‘Miles to go before I sleep’

On terrorism, war, lies and deception

Drones are in the news. Various foreign agencies have put the number of civilian deaths in the hundreds, even thousands. But hot in the wake of Nawaz Sharif reporting to Washington, our government gave a fatwa: drones have killed only 67 innocents.

With so much lying going around, one doesn’t know whom to believe, but nowadays one is tempted to believe any government the least. Not that 67 is a small number. The death of one innocent human being is tantamount to the killing of humanity – 67 murders are totally unconscionable. But 67 puts the US in a less bad light, though it doesn’t decrease the even worse bad light shining on the terrorists who have killed some 45,000 innocents purportedly in retaliation to drone strikes. Our satraps have done their loyal duty by the hegemon. Their tragedy is that no one believes anything they say.

The late actor/broadcaster Peter Ustinov put it succinctly: “Terrorism is the war of the poor. War is the terrorism of the rich.” Here is another symbiotic relationship, a Yin-Yang, a materialistic dialectic of perpetual conflict, hegemony the thesis, resistance the anti-thesis, war the thesis, terrorism the anti-thesis. One is state terrorism; the reaction to it is non-state terrorism.

I have always said that non-state terrorism is a product of state terrorism. Often, intelligence agencies deliberately perpetrate a terrorist act and plant evidence of someone else having done it to justify action against the falsely implicated to target him. They are called false flag operations that I have written about earlier – do a dastardly act and plant the flag of another on the debris to implicate him.

Sometimes hegemons or would-be hegemons set up terrorist groups themselves, as it is suspected that the TTP might be a product of the US intelligence working in tandem with Afghan intelligence to justify action against Pakistan if, for example, we are unable to prevent the TTP attacking NATO vehicles taking soldiers, arms and equipment out of Afghanistan.

Friday’s killing of the leader of the Taliban by a US drone strike doesn’t lift the suspicion. Such people are dispensable in the context of the larger doctrine of destabilizing a country to justify action against it. It has put paid to any negotiations, will increase terrorism in Pakistan and destabilize it further in the face of the inept leaderships infesting this country.

False flag operations are as old as the hills. For lack of cogent evidence except the incredible, many US commentators continue to suspect that 9/11 may have been a false flag operation. Case in point: a hijacker’s near undamaged passport is ‘discovered’ in the debris of the World Trade Center while two huge jetliners got vaporized. So too the Abbotabad operation that is supposed to have killed Osama bin Laden: no incontrovertible evidence has been furnished that it indeed was Bin Laden. That those who ask questions are summarily dismissed as ‘conspiracy theorists’ reinforces suspicions that the authorities concerned have no answers.

“False flag terrorism occurs when elements within a government stage a secret operation whereby government forces pretend to be a targeted enemy while attacking their own forces or people. The attack is then falsely blamed on the enemy in order to justify going to war against that enemy.” When it is incontrovertibly shown that the claim that Saddam possessed WMD to ‘justify’ an attack on Iraq was false, they get brazen.

Wikipedia says that, “False flag operations are covert operations conducted by governments, corporations, or other organizations, which are designed to deceive the public in such a way that the operations appear as if they are being carried out by other entities… The name is derived from the military concept of flying false colours; that is, flying the flag of a country other than one’s own. The term comes from the old days of wooden ships, when one ship would hang the flag of its enemy before attacking another ship in its own navy. Because the enemy’s flag was hung instead of the flag of the real country of the attacking ship, it was called a ‘false flag’ attack.”

The US President James Madison said: “If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.” Hermann Goering, put it better: “Why of course the people don’t want war… But after all it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship… Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”

Former British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook put it best: “The so-called Al Qaeda that we see are actually Kharjees along with Mossad, CIA and RAW led and trained mercenary gangs like TTP who pose as Islamic Jihadists and create justification for global information war and propaganda to launch a new war against another Muslim country.

“The truth is there is no Islamic army or terrorist group called Al Qaeda. And any informed intelligence officer knows this. But there is propaganda to make the public believe in the presence of an identified entity representing the devil only in order to drive TV watchers to accept a unified international leadership for a war against terrorism. The country behind this propaganda is the US.”

Go ahead. Call Robin Cook a ‘conspiracy theorist’. He died while hiking in the Scottish Highlands. One wonders. Dr Kelly – who could have shown that the assertion of the British government that Iraq had WMD was false – also died walking in a park. Now do you understand why I have stopped walking on roads and in parks or cricket grounds? They could be teeming with intelligence operatives and wild boars.

For more on false flags read the essay ‘Want to Know’ from ‘Truther’ of October 11, 2013. Suffice it to tell you that General Tommy Franks said that if the US is attacked again “the Constitution will likely be discarded in favour of military form of government.” Far-fetched? Perhaps, but if the NSA that is actually running America can cynically tap the phones of foreign heads of government, anything is possible. There is no gainsaying that they don’t tap Obama’s phones too and certainly Nawaz Sharif’s. Privacy is a thing of the past. Why, even one’s neighbours are invading one’s privacy, peering over one’s boundary walls and brazenly taking photographs. Ask me. The truth is far more bizarre than fiction.

Seymour Hersh, the American Pulitzer Prize winning journalist says about the Obama-get-Osama caper in Abbotabad that the ‘independent’ report contains “facts” provided by the US administration that “will not hold up under scrutiny.” When I said this after the Abbotabad incident I was called – you guessed it – a ‘conspiracy theorist’. By extension, Seymour Hersh must be a conspiracy theorist too. “The Pakistanis put out a report,” says Hersh, “don’t get me going on it. Let’s put it this way, it was done with considerable American input. It’s a bullshit report.” So much for our clapped out judges, and tired old diplomats, who comprised the Commission.

When some suggest that the US could have taken control of the 9/11 aircraft from the ground, they were scoffed at. America has the codes of every plane made in America. If they can sit miles away and control unmanned aircraft and fire Hellfire missiles, why can’t they take control of manned commercial jetliners? America has now made a surveillance drone the size of an ant. They can make a blind person ‘see’ by applying a band on his limb and use his skin as ‘eyes’ – my world-class ophthalmologist who also makes world-class ‘kheer’ or rice pudding as good as she gives eye injections should please note. They have learned how to bend light and thus cloak things like bombers, jetfighters, tanks and ships and probably even soldiers and spies, like the ‘Klingons’ cloak their spaceships in ‘Star Wars’.

Fiction turned to fact, what? Dr. Atta ur Rahman told me all this – not the ‘kheer’ of course. Ask him. He is writing about such things in my daughter Mashaal’s magazine ‘Blue Chip’. With such high scientific and technological capabilities America can do things that we Third World simpletons versed in the humanities – subjects for those who can’t study, Oxford’s PPE being the worst – cannot even begin to understand.

I’ve always exhorted you to think. Please, for God’s sake, THINK. Reclaim your abdicated mind from the mullah and the propagandist. Don’t always take every report of every government at face value. Tear down the veil and see what lies beyond. The tip of the iceberg tells you nothing about the iceberg. You have to dive deep into the freezing ocean and see for yourself. Don’t reduce yourself to a mindless robot lapping up propaganda by governments and sections of the media. Don’t let your perceptions be managed.

Why labour the point? My mind is tired with all the lies, my heart sickened. Let younger people take up the baton. I have other things to do and “miles to go before I sleep.”

Humayun Gauhar is a political analyst. He can be reached at: [email protected].