Competitive Grieving: The Boston Bombings

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Competitive Grieving: The Boston Bombings

by Binoy Kampmark / April 17th, 2013

Three people are dead, and over a hundred injured after the bomb attacks on the Boston Marathon on Monday. As yet, no group has been found, or perpetrator identified with certainty. The police are scouring the pathway of the marathon anticipating more explosive devices. From what is trickling to media sources, pressure cooker devices packed with shrapnel were used to inflict the carnage.

The scene can do nothing but trigger sympathy. Civilians going about their activities of recreation; a sporting occasion of international stature, and then, bombs going off at and near the finishing line. An elderly runner knocked off his feet; the desperation as security forces moving in to secure the area; blood spattered and broken bodies carried or wheeled off. All of this, filmed, live and ready, and for that reason, potent.

The ease here, and notably in the United States, will be to let such suffering obscure other cases of inflicted violence. In far off lands, bombs drop from unmanned aerial vehicles and obliterate entire families in the blink of an eye. Manned aircraft armed to the teeth with ordinance achieve the same result. There are few tears. The car bombs that went off in Iraq on Monday were also savage with a higher death toll, killing 9 people and wounding 27. On the weekend, similar attacks left 55 dead across the country. The slain are worth a mention, no more. Death can be another country.

The temptation is so often one that Fox News exploits: the desire to see harm if it comes from the “enemy” as unique, and its infliction as unforgivably demonic. In the calculus of suffering, Americanism reigns supreme. The news agencies, of whatever colour, are also falling into line. “Young Boston bombing victim was waiting to hug his dad,” goes one headline with the AFP. Yes, we should mourn eight-year old Martin Richard who died near the Boston marathon’s 26-mile marker, but in the saturation age of the 24 hour news cycle, few will know the names of other children slain in other conflict zones. It doesn’t make either Richard or any other child less or more fortunate – it simply means that the focus of suffering has varying weight. Rolling cameras, and a keen audience, help.

The recent killing of Afghan civilians, as uncovered by an Afghan investigation team assigned by President Hamid Karzai, was a stark reminder that death at the hands of those capable of inflicting harm is global. On that occasion, 17 civilians perished in a NATO-led airstrike in the eastern province of Kunar. Such killings are but murmurs in the American media scape. The infliction of death, and its commemoration, is often specific and selective. Why one is killed varies – in the case of the fatalities from NATO airstrikes (directed or misdirected), there is always an apology that follows. Militants were the intended target, even if they were amongst you. Reckless indifference to human life is tolerated.

But in a situation such as the Boston bomb killings, eulogies can so often turn into security jerks and vengeful responses. The victims become exemplar Americans who were killed by “un-American” elements, when, ironically, it may turn out that the perpetrators were as American as any other, reared on the milk of patriotic insensibility. President Barack Obama, to his credit, has not put his foot on the accelerator of the US Security State – yet.

Such attacks produce another aberration. The arm chair conspiracy theorist, going to seed behind the keyboard, will whizz off theories of government complicity. The news cycle, ironically, deters reliability. As Hank Suever in the Washington Post (April 16) remarked, “News, both as a phenomenon and a commodity, must now travel faster than it can be verified, and our demands for who-what-why-how must now come bundled with caution.”

The conspiracy theorist is not merely found in civilian ranks. The Bush administration took irrational reasoning and myth-making presumptions of danger in the “War on Terror” to new levels. It takes paranoia to feed paranoia. The desire to inflate, to magnify the significance of a foe, can prove irresistible. To that end, localised acts of terror can be given an international accent, a situation which we have seen played out, to a certain extent, in Mali. The United States has an active list of domestic terror groups, not all of whom are that keen on following the light of the Prophet. Conspicuous violence has been left to angst-driven teenagers with easy access to heavy weaponry.

Then there is that uncomfortable sense of disproportion, where one starts having sessions of competitive grief, or even competitive grief fatigue. Was Sandy Hook, a terrifying spectacle that brings warfare to urban environments, somehow less significant because it did not involve bombs at a sporting marathon? America is at war with itself, and one that extends to the school yards.

“Terror” comes in various guises – security fantasies of armed schools as suggested by the National Rifles Association; domestic dissidents with a grudge and genuine foreign enemies. But for now, the implications of the Boston bomb attacks are still to be felt in their entirety. In the meantime, the condition of competitive grieving, or not grieving at all, will persist.

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne and can be reached at: bkampmark@gmail.com. Read other articles by Binoy.

This article was posted on Wednesday, April 17th, 2013 at 8:01am and is filed under Afghanistan, Iraq, Media.

http://dissidentvoice.org/2013/04/competitive-grieving-the-boston-bombings/

April 17, 2013

Reaping the Whirlwind

A Violent Act Again in a Violent Nation

by DAVE LINDORFF

I ran the Boston Marathon back in 1968, and, my feet covered with blisters inside my Keds sneakers, dragged across the finish line to meet my waiting uncle at a time of about 3 hours and 40 minutes. It was close enough to the time that the current bombing happened in this year’s race — about four hours from the starting gun — that had I been running it this year, I might still been near enough to the finish line to have heard the blasts.

That really brings home to me the horror of what just happened.

At the same time, I’m reminded that back when I ran my Boston Marathon, which was only weeks after the Viet Cong’s bloody Tet Offensive, we didn’t give a thought to the idea of the Viet Cong bringing their war home to America. Now you have to at least wonder whether this bombing might in some way have been linked to America’s various wars abroad.

We don’t at this point have a clue who was behind this atrocity, but whether it was some foreign terrorist organization, a contingent of Taliban fighters seeking to bring the Afghan War to the US, or a domestic right-wing group protesting abortion, the income tax or the country’s “Kenyan” president, it should be a wake-up call to the nation that our violent national culture and our imperial pretensions will eventually reap us a whirlwind.

A country that goes around blowing up children in Afghanistan by the score, as happened last week in Kundar Province, Afghanistan, that claims for itself the right to kill anyone, anywhere, if the president or his designees in the Pentagon and the CIA decide that person is a threat or an annoyance (and that is willing to kill lots of innocent bystanders, including women and kids, to do it), a country that encourages its police to act like an occupying military force in their jurisdictions, breaking into homes in SWAT gear at dawn, pointing assault rifles in people’s faces, arresting people on trumped-up charges, such a country and its people at some point must realize that such behavior invites a violent response.

This time, it was apparently crudely made IEDs that killed three and tore the limbs from other people innocently participating in or watching a road race. Note, though, that we had never even heard of IEDs until Bush’s and Cheney’s criminal invasion of Iraq. Next time, it could just as easily be a home-made remotely piloted drone aircraft carrying a load of TNT or some other deadly explosive.

The point is you reap what you sow. Violence begets violence.

So America, the most violent country in the world today, lurches from one act of mayhem to another. It really matters little whether the slaughter is caused by a wack-job armed with a few high-capacity-clip automatic pistols or a foreign or domestic terrorist armed with a couple of crude IEDs. The victims are just as dead or maimed either way.

We cannot hope to escape this kind of thing if we go on as we are going.

If the government responds to this latest tragedy by doubling down on its domestic spying campaign, by enhancing police powers, by stepping up its deadly global drone war, and by invading or meddling in more countries abroad, we can expect more and more violent attacks aimed at killing Americans here at home.

I’m especially contemplating the danger of blowback because we learned here in Philadelphia only two weeks ago that the Pentagon has decided to set up a drone piloting base just two miles from my house on the site of the mothballed Willow Grove Naval Air Station. None of the local pols who were effusively praising the announcement, hailing it as a job-creating phenomenon, gave a thought to the reality that this was bringing the front line of the Afghan War to the suburbs of Philly, and that besides putting a bunch of killers in uniform in our midst, it was putting a big bull’s eye right in a suburb full of civilians. (See my article about this in the latest issue of CounterPunch’s new monthly magazine.)

Clearly we need a new approach — one that relies on fostering international peace and cooperation, and that here at home seeks to rekindle some sense of community, and of reverence for the rights and freedoms that many people have died for, but which have over last two decades been whittled away until they are vestigial or barely recognizable.

Maybe too, we Americans could look at the latest carnage in Boston and recognize it as the very thing that our military has been engaged in doing in our name in places like Iraq and Afghanistan — right down to the deliberate and sick timing of a second bomb to blow up people who are coming to the aid of victims of the first bomb, which is the wretched MO of the US bombing and drone strike campaigns along the Afghanistan/Pakistan border.

I’m disgusted by the attack on the Boston Marathon, and whoever did it is truly twisted, but no less twisted are the Pentagon officers and who planned the attack that killed those 10 children in Kundar, or the president who ordered the leveling of the Iraqi city of Fallujah. We Americans are far too selective in our sense of horror and outrage.

It all makes me sick. I’m going out for a run.

Dave Lindorff is a  founder of This Can’t Be Happening and a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, published by AK Press. Hopeless is also available in a Kindle edition. Lindorff’s article on drones in Philadelphia appears in the March issue of CounterPunch magazine. He lives in Philadelphia.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/04/17/a-violent-act-again-in-a-violent-nation/

Boston Marathon Bombing Highlights the Illusion of Terror and Security

By Tony Cartalucci

Global Research, April 17, 2013

Land Destroyer

Region: USA

Theme: 9/11 & 'War on Terrorism', Police State & Civil Rights

Sometime before 1775, American Founding Father, Benjamin Franklin wrote:

They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.

Across much of the West, after September 11, 2001, we have indeed given up our essential liberty, and more over, our dignity in exchange for the illusion of safety. Our streets and public events are filled with militarized police and very literally soldiers wielding machine guns and riding around in armored vehicles. And yet with this militarized security, invasive Constitution-violating searches, warrantless wiretaps, humiliating pat-downs by federal security at airports, terrorist bombs still managed to rip through the streets of Boston killing 3 and injuring many more.

There is nothing more symbolic of the fall of America as a free people than scenes of impotent militarized police standing around aimlessly with their immense arsenal cradled in their idle hands in the wake of an attack their presence did nothing to prevent. What’s more, is their presence after the attack was likewise useless, their weapons and armor incapable of doing anything to help the scores of injured.

Image: (AP) Militarized police stand around aimlessly before and after the blasts in Boston – exposing the “safety” offered to the public in the last 10 years by the growing police state as a mere illusion we have been made to accept, but clearly, to no avail.

….

We have given up our liberty and our dignity in order to obtain a little temporary safety – and predictably we have neither liberty nor safety.

The FBI and the Illusion of Terror

Disturbing is the habit of the FBI’s posing as terrorists with ties to Al Qaeda, approaching patsies who they then provide explosives and other weapons to, and help engineer an attack which they then “foil” to make spectacular headlines. Many times real explosives are test-detonated with suspects, before inert devices are switched in for the final attack.

In one case in Portland Oregon in 2010, a van was actually parked next to a crowded Christmas tree lighting ceremony where the FBI-entrapped suspect attempted and failed to detonate an FBI-provided inert bomb.

More astounding was the fact that the FBI had actually brought this same entrapped suspect earlier to a location in Lincoln County, Oregon, where real explosives were in fact detonated. The FBI’s official statement titled, “Oregon Resident Arrested in Plot to Bomb Christmas Tree Lighting Ceremony in Portland,” released by the U.S. Attorney’s Office on November 26, 2010 stated (emphasis added):

According to the affidavit, on November 4, 2010, Mohamud and the undercover FBI operatives traveled to a remote location in Lincoln County, Ore., where they detonated a bomb concealed in a backpack as a trial run for the upcoming attack. Afterwards, on the drive back to Corvallis, undercover FBI operatives questioned Mohamud as to whether he was capable of looking at the bodies of those who would be killed in the upcoming attack in Portland. According to the affidavit, Mohamud responded, “I want whoever is attending that event to leave, to leave either dead or injured.”

More frightening still was the apparent motivation behind the FBI’s uncover operation.

In 2005, Portland became the first city in the United States to withdraw from the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, (JTTF) over concerns it would threaten civil liberties. The FBI, unwelcomed in Portland, decided to then approach a dupe, entrap him, and spectacularly “foil” a high profile terror plot of their own design during Portland’s annual Christmas tree lighting ceremony – without notifying the local government or local law enforcement of the on going operation.

The operation would humiliate local representatives and in particular, Mayor Sam Adams, making them appear negligent, incompetent, and impotent. And, in the wake of the operation, citing the FBI’s charade specifically, Portland would eventually agree to rejoin the JTTF.

What, if not terrorism, would such events be classified as? The FBI’s JTTF was ousted from Portland, and it subsequently used the threat of violence to coerce the city into accepting it back. It was an operation A-Z engineered by the FBI with a specific political motivation lurking just beneath the surface.

The opaque, covert nature of these operations should also profoundly disturb readers. The FBI apparently has access to vast resources to conduct these operations, including weapons, real explosives, vehicles, and just about everything else most likely used in the Boston blasts. According to the New York Times, in their article, “Portland, Ore., Votes to Rejoin Task Force After Terrorism Scare:”

The investigation had been under way for many months, but the Portland police were consulted only near the end, largely to help with logistics of a sting operation. Mayor Sam Adams was unaware until after the arrest.

Who then is overseeing these operations outside of the FBI? These are operations where real explosives are even detonated … and in the case of the World Trade Center bombing in 1993, FBI monitored suspects actually went through with the final attack, killing 6, and wounding many more (The New York Times, “Tapes Depict Proposal to Thwart Bomb Used in Trade Center Blast“).

The answer is, no one is overseeing them, and they are kept secret until the FBI either “foils” them for political points, or a witness steps forward and reveals the FBI’s role in successful attacks that maim or kill innocent people.

This constitutes a very real terror threat to America, but one that lurks within Washington and in our cities’ local FBI offices, carried out by men in suits and ties, not cave-dwelling extremists in Afghanistan or “homegrown terrorists.” For the people of Boston, one of the first targets for investigation should in fact be, the local FBI office.

Monsters of Our Own Creation/Perpetuation 

And while America’s domestic threat is one contrived and perpetuated primarily by the very people charged with defending the nation against terrorism, real foreign extremists do exist. It should surprise no one however, considering what the FBI does at home, who is minding this terrorist network abroad.

It is now believed that pressure cooker improvised explosive devices were used in the blasts – devices frequently used overseas by Al Qaeda’s many various incarnations. Should “Al Qaeda” turn out to be behind the Boston blasts, readers would benefit from understanding just what exactly “Al Qaeda” is.

CBS News in their report titled, “Homeland Security warned about pressure cooker bombs,” stated:

U.S. authorities warned as far back as nine years ago that terrorists could use metal pressure cookers to cause deadly carnage.

The common kitchen cooking implement – found in countless American homes – has emerged as a key component in the horrific bombings that killed three people and injured more than 170 at the Boston Marathon yesterday.

The article would continue by stating:

In 2004 a memo titled “Potential terrorist use of pressure cookers” alerted border inspectors, agents, law enforcement officers and other first-responders that the seemingly-innocuous items could be used to create improvised explosive devices (IEDs).

The memo says the bomb-making technique is commonly taught in Afghan terrorist training camps – and had already led to bombing casualties.

The article would also mention terrorists operating in Algeria using rigged pressure cooker devices to carry out attacks – militants long associated not only with Al Qaeda directly, but neighboring Libyan terrorist organization, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) which was recently handed the nation of Libya by NATO.

This would also be the same Al Qaeda that the US and NATO are in the process of arming and funding in Syria for the past 2 years. Likewise, it is the same Al Qaeda spawned from the sectarian crypto-terror organization, the Muslim Brotherhood, helped into power on the back of region-wide US-engineered political destabilization, and funded to the tune of billions by America’s allies in Riyadh and Doha.

In fact, for the past 30 years, the US, Saudi Arabia, and other regional allies including Israel have cultivated, armed, funded, and expanded Al Qaeda, using them as both a casus belli for military intervention and a global mercenary force everywhere from Libya to Bosnia, Iraq to Iran, Afghanistan, and of course across Syria for the past two years.

And even as the Boston blasts appear to be shaping up as the work of sectarian extremists affiliated with this vast network of US-Saudi sponsored terror, US ally Qatar is defending its aid given to terrorists operating across Syria. Reuters reported in their article, “Qatar says aid for Syria rebels and Islamists won’t harm region,” that:

Qatar on Tuesday rejected criticism that it risked destabilizing the Middle East by supporting rebels in Syria or the Muslim Brotherhood and said it was helping people but did not interfere in governments.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has accused Arab states who are arming and sheltering rebel fighters of actions that could “create a domino effect throughout the Middle East and beyond,” with Saudi Arabia and Qatar clearly in mind.

Qatar had armed, funded, and even provided air support and troops to Al Qaeda in Libya during their successful bid to overthrow the government and take power in Tripoli. The Guardian reported in their article, “Qatar admits sending hundreds of troops to support Libya rebels,” that:

Qatar has admitted for the first time that it sent hundreds of troops to support the Libyan rebels who overthrew Muammar Gaddafi’s regime.

The Gulf state had previously acknowledged only that its air force took part in Nato-led attacks.

So clearly, Qatar is in the business of interfering with governments, and using Al Qaeda militants to do so.

Similarly, Qatar, along with Saudi Arabia, the US, Turkey, Israel and other allies, have been funneling cash and thousands of tons of weapons into Syria – all of which have ended up in the hands of Al Qaeda’s Syrian franchise, Jabhat al-Nusra.

The New York Times in their article titled, “Arms Airlift to Syria Rebels Expands, With C.I.A. Aid,” admits that:

With help from the C.I.A., Arab governments and Turkey have sharply increased their military aid to Syria’s opposition fighters in recent months, expanding a secret airlift of arms and equipment for the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad, according to air traffic data, interviews with officials in several countries and the accounts of rebel commanders.

The airlift, which began on a small scale in early 2012 and continued intermittently through last fall, expanded into a steady and much heavier flow late last year, the data shows. It has grown to include more than 160 military cargo flights by Jordanian, Saudi and Qatari military-style cargo planes landing at Esenboga Airport near Ankara, and, to a lesser degree, at other Turkish and Jordanian airports.

While the West attempts to claim these weapons are being sent to “moderates,” the US itself admits that Al Qaeda is operating in every major city in Syria and is by far the most highly organized, most prominent militant front in the conflict. If the West via Saudi Arabia and Qatar is sending thousands of tons of weapons to “moderates,” who is sending more weapons to Jabhat al-Nusra?

The obvious answer is there are no moderates, and the West has been intentionally arming Al Qaeda from the beginning. In fact, this is a documented conspiracy first revealed as early as 2007 by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh in his New Yorker article titled, “”The Redirection: Is the Administration’s new policy benefiting our enemies in the war on terrorism?” which stated specifically:

To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has coöperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.

Further evidence that the summation of US aid has fallen into the hands of Al Qaeda in Syria, comes to us from Washington Post propagandist Liz Sly who reported in her article, “U.S. feeds Syrians, but secretly,” that:

In the heart of rebel-held territory in Syria’s northern province of Aleppo, a small group of intrepid Westerners is undertaking a mission of great stealth. Living anonymously in a small rural community, they travel daily in unmarked cars, braving airstrikes, shelling and the threat of kidnapping to deliver food and other aid to needy Syrians — all of it paid for by the U.S. government.

Sly then claims that most Syrians credit Al Qaeda’s al-Nusra with providing the aid:

“America has done nothing for us. Nothing at all,” said Mohammed Fouad Waisi, 50, spitting out the words for emphasis in his small Aleppo grocery store, which adjoins a bakery where he buys bread every day. The bakery is fully supplied with flour paid for by the United States. But Waisi credited Jabhat al-Nusra — a rebel group the United States has designated a terrorist organization because of its ties to al-Qaeda — with providing flour to the region, though he admitted he wasn’t sure where it comes from.

And while Sly attempts to spin the story as merely misdirected anger and ignorance on the part of Syrians receiving the aid, it is well documented that bakeries in terrorist-held territory are manned by Al Qaeda militants. In fact, while Sly maintains that “security concerns” are owed for America’s opaque aid distribution, it appears more likely the US is attempting to insidiously obfuscate its use of humanitarian aid to help its militant proxies win “hearts and minds” amid a humanitarian catastrophe the West itself engineered and perpetuated intentionally.

The London Telegraph reported in their article, “Syria: how jihadist group Jabhat al-Nusra is taking over Syria’s revolution,” that taking over bakeries was a key strategy used by Al Qaeda’s al-Nusra front to “win over” the population:

Then, in the past weeks, Jabhat al-Nusra – which is outside the FSA – pushed other rebel groups out of the stores and established a system to distribute bread throughout rebel areas.

In a small office attached to a bakery in the Miesseh district of Aleppo, Abu Yayha studied a map pinned on the wall. Numbers were scrawled in pencil against streets.

“We counted the population of every street to assess the need for the area,” explained Mr Yahya. “We provide 23,593 bags of bread every two days for this area. This is just in one district. We are calculating the population in other districts and doing the same there.

“In shops the cost is now 125 Syrian pounds (£1.12) for one pack. Here we sell it at 50 Syrian pounds (45p) for two bags. We distribute some for free for those who cannot pay.”

The bakery works constantly. Inside, barrows filled with dough were heaved onto a conveyor belt that chopped it into round and flat segments, before pushing the dough into a giant oven. Workers packed the steaming flatbread in bags.

“I am from Jabhat al Nusra. All the managers of all the bakeries are,” said Abu Fattah, the manager. “This makes sure that nobody steals.”

In essence, Al Qaeda is taking over neighborhoods upon a mountain of US-provided flour, in bakeries overrun and held at the barrels of US-provided guns.

With this in mind, it becomes clear that not only has America traded in its liberty and dignity for the illusion of safety, but they have done so in the face of fear manufactured and intentionally perpetuated by their own government – a government willfully using the very terror organizations they hold over the American people’s heads as justification for an ever-expanding police state at home, as an international mercenary force with which to target their geopolitical enemies abroad.

It is an illusion of both terror and security, masterfully implemented with a myriad of propagandists and corporate-financier interests working in coordination to foist this scheme upon Western civilization and beyond. It is essential to identify these corporate-financier interests, boycott them, and permanently replace them with local solutions – lest we be bent eternally to this charade, without liberty, without dignity, and clearly, without safety.

Articles by: Tony Cartalucci

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