Bush administration officials and the anti-Islamic-spin factor

[pkpatriotic]

Saturday, May 10, 2008
Since the events of 9/11 some Bush administration officials have spent years trying to imply, in effect, that Islam is synonymous with terrorism. Their particular brand of anti-Islamic spin, which has been aided and abetted by neo-conservative sections of the mainstream American media like Fox News and others, coupled with the fallout from the US invasion and occupation of Afghanistan in November 2001 and of Iraq in March 2003, in which hundreds of thousands of Muslim civilians have been killed, have fueled anti-American sentiments throughout the Islamic world and have made the United States government hated in most Muslim countries.

President George W. Bush has played a leading role in this exercise in spin-doctoring by his use of such religiously loaded anti-Muslim terms as a “crusade” to describe the US attack on the Taliban and al-Qaeda. The attack on Afghanistan was initially given the codename “Operation Infinite Justice” by US officials, but they had to quickly back-pedal and change the codename when angry Muslim leaders said that “only God can dispense infinite justice.”

Now, according to an article by the American news agency United Press International (UPI) published on May 7, 2008, “US officials are being advised in internal (US) government documents to avoid referring publicly to al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups as Islamic or Muslim, and not to use terms like jihad or mujahideen, which ‘unintentionally legitmise’ terrorism.”

A former senior Bush administration official who was involved until recently in policy debates on the issue was quoted by the UPI report as saying, “There is a growing consensus (in the Bush administration) that we need to move away from that language.”

Instead, the report added, “in two documents circulated last month by the National Counterterrorism Centre (NCTC), the multi-agency centre charged with strategic coordination of the US war on terror, officials are urged to use terms such as violent extremists, totalitarian and death cult to characterise al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups.”

The irony, however, is that terms like mujahideen and jihad were used as terms of approval by US officials and the American media back in the 1980s when Afghan guerrillas were fighting the Soviet troops that had occupied their country.

Moreover, describing al-Qaeda as a “terrorist group” ignores the fact that US troops in Afghanistan and Iraq have killed far more people and spread far more terror in those countries than any so-called al-Qaeda group. What do US “Daisy Cutter” bombs and “Hellfire” missiles do except terrorise the people against whom they are used?

Or are we expected to believe that Daisy Cutters and Hellfire missiles spread sweetness and joy among the people on whom they are dropped? If Bush administration officials expect us to believe that, they must think we are so gullible that we’ll believe anything.

“Avoid labeling everything ‘Muslim.’ It reinforces the ‘US vs. Islam’ framework that al-Qaeda promotes,” according to “Words that Work and Words that Don’t: A Guide to Counter-Terrorism Communication,” produced last month by the NCTC.

“You have a large percentage of the world’s population that subscribes to this religion (Islam),” the former US official was quoted as saying. “Unintentionally alienating them is not a judicious move,” he added, in what must be the understatement of the year.

Moreover, the very fact that Bush administration officials have to be told that a large percentage of the world’s population subscribes to Islam is an example of how little many US officials – and, indeed, Americans in general – know about societies other than their own.

Given this state of ignorance, it will probably come as a surprise to most Americans to learn that, according to the latest estimates, the world’s Muslim population now outnumbers those that believe in Christianity or any other religion.

The NCTC documents, first reported by the Associated Press news agency, were posted online last week by the Investigative Project on Terrorism, said the UPI report.

The report said that the documents “highlight developments in the Bush administration’s strategy for its war on terror that have been fiercely criticised by some who have been its closest allies on the issue, and apparently are being ignored by the presumptive Republican Party presidential nominee, Senator John McCain of Arizona.”

In this context, it needs to be remembered that McCain was recently quoted as saying that US troops “may have to stay in Iraq for another 100 years.”

The UPI report said that “some commentators noted after President Bush’s State of the Union speech in January that Mr McCain had stopped using the term Islamic terrorism, instead referring – as the NCTC guide recommends – to ‘terrorists and extremists – evil men who despise freedom, despise America, and aim to subject millions to their violent rule.”

But in a recent interview with The Washington Times, a McCain aide said the senator would continue to use the term “Islamic terrorism,” the UPI report added.

The fact of the matter, however, is that the biggest terrorist in the world is the US government, followed by the Israeli government. Successive US and Israeli governments have practiced state terrorism on a massive scale for decades – against the Palestinian people in Israel’s case, and against numerous countries in the US’s case.

In the six decades since the end of World War II, there has hardly been a time when US troops were not involved in military action against some country: Vietnam (where US forces killed 3.5 million Vietnamese), Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Panama, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq – the list goes on and on.

Since the beginning of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq in March 2003, 1.2 million Iraqis have died as a result of the conflict up to the end of September 2007, according to a survey conducted by Business Opinion Research, a British organisation.

During the same period, about 4,500 US soldiers have died in Iraq. That’s a death ratio of one American per 266 Iraqis. How many more Iraqis must die before the Bush administration’s bloodlust is slaked?

The UPI report said that “David Sutherland, who runs the (US) Department of Homeland Security Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties insisted that the avoidance of the term Islam in conjunction with terrorism ‘is in no way an exercise in political correctness…We are not watering down what we say. There are some terms which al-Qaeda wants us to use because they are helpful to them’.”

How does Sutherland know what al-Qaeda wants the US to do? Has he ever spoken to any member of the group? Has he ever exchanged e-mails or letters with any member of the group? If not, how does he know what they want? This type of supposition is yet another example of spin.

As for Sutherland’s claim that US officials are “not watering down” what they say, just what exactly is it that they are doing? It sounds very much like watering down to me.

The NCTC “Words that Work” guide notes, “Although the al-Qaeda network exploits religious sentiments and tries to use religion to justify its actions, we should treat it as an illegitimate political organisation, both terrorist and criminal.”

But is there even such a thing as an “al-Qaeda network”? Where are its headquarters? And how does this so-called “network” communicate with its members? No credible answers to these questions have ever been forthcoming from Bush administration officials, or from anybody else for that matter.

Instead of calling terrorist groups “Muslim or Islamic,” the NCTC guide suggests using words like totalitarian, terrorist or violent extremist – “widely understood terms that define our enemies appropriately and simultaneously deny them any level of legitimacy.”

But are Bush administration officials in any position to talk about “legitimacy” given the fact that its invasion and occupation of Iraq is an unprovoked and utterly illegal military operation, in violation of every canon of international law and in flagrant defiance of world public opinion?

The Bush administration’s cooked up excuse for invading Iraq – that, in Bush’s words, it “possesses weapons of mass destruction that poise an imminent threat to the national security of the United States” – was an outright lie, as the whole world now knows.

In fact, Iraq possessed no WMD and posed no threat whatsoever to the mighty United States. Soon after the invasion, Bush sent a team of 1,400 US weapons inspectors and intelligence agents into Iraq to look for the WMD it allegedly possessed. After a 16-month search up and down the country, the US team had still not found even a single WMD or even any evidence of the existence of a WMD programme.

Wags then promptly dubbed the non-existent WMD “Weapons of Mass Disappearance.” It’s been years since Bush last spoke about Iraq’s WMD.