Introduction
Two major terrorists’ attacks took place
almost simultaneously: in Boston, two Chechen terrorists set off bombs during
the annual Boston Marathon killing three people and injuring 170; in Venezuela,
terrorist-supporters of defeated presidential candidate, Henrique Capriles,
assassinated 8 and injured 70 supporters of victorious Socialist Party
candidate Nicolas Maduro, in the course of firebombing 8 health clinics and several
Party offices and homes. In the case of Boston, the terrorist spree resulted in
one further fatality - one of the perpetrators; in Venezuela, some of the
terrorists are under arrest but their political mentors are still free and
active – in fact they are now presented as ‘victims of repression’ by the US
media.
By examining the context, politics, government
responses and mass media treatment of these terrorist acts we can gain insight
into the larger meaning of terrorism and how it reflects, not merely the
hypocrisy of the US government and mass media, but the underlying politics that
encourages terrorism.
Context of
Terrorism: From Chechnya to Boston: A Dangerous Game
Chechnya has been an armed battleground for
over two decades pitting the secular Russian State against local Muslim
fundamentalist separatists. Washington, fresh from arming and financing Muslim
jihadis in a successful war against the secular Soviet-backed Afghan regime in
the 1980’s, expanded its aid program into Central Asian and Caucasian Muslim
regions of the former Soviet Union. Russian military might ultimately defeated
the Chechen warlords but many of their armed followers fled to other countries,
joining armed, extremist, Islamist groups in Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan and
later Egypt, Libya and now Syria. While accepting Western, especially US arms,
to fight secular adversaries of the US Empire, the jihadis’ ultimate goal has
been a clerical (Islamic) regime. Washington and the Europeans have played a
dangerous game: using Muslim fundamentalists as shock troops to defeat secular
nationalists, while planning to dump them in favor of neo-liberal ‘moderate’
Muslim or secular client regimes afterwards.
This cynical policy has backfired everywhere –
including in the US. Fundamentalists in Afghanistan took state power after the
Soviets pulled out. They opposed the US, which invaded Afghanistan after the
attacks of September 11, 2001, and have successfully engaged in a 12 year war
of attrition with Washington and NATO, spawning powerful allies in Pakistan and
elsewhere. Taliban-controlled areas of Afghanistan serve as training bases and
a ‘beacon’ for terrorists the world over.
The US invasion of Iraq and overthrow of
President Saddam Hussein led to ten years of Al Qaeda and related-clerical
terrorism in Iraq, wiping out the entire secular society. In the case of Libya
and Syria, NATO and Gulf State arms have greatly expanded the arsenals of
terrorist fundamentalists in North and Sub-Sahara Africa and the Middle East. Western-sponsored
fundamentalist terrorists were directly related to the perpetrators of the 9/11
attacks on New York and Washington and there is little doubt that the recent
actions of the Chechen bombers in Boston are products of this latest upsurge of
NATO-backed fundamentalist advances in North Africa and the Middle East.
But against all the evidence to the contrary,
Chechen terrorists are viewed by the White House as “freedom fighters” engaged
in liberating their country from the secular Russians … Perhaps after the
Boston terror attack, that appraisal will change.
Venezuela:
Presenting Terrorism as “Peaceful Dissent”
The candidate of the US backed and financed
opposition, Henrique Capriles, has lived up to his reputation for violent
politics. In the run-up to his failed candidacy in the Venezuelan presidential
election on April 15, his followers sabotaged power lines causing frequent
national blackouts. His supporters among the elite hoarded basic consumer
items, causing shortages, and repeatedly threatened violence if the election
went against them. With over 100 international observers from the United
Nations, European Commission and the Jimmy Carter Center there to certify
the Venezuelan elections, Capriles and his inner circle unleashed their street
gangs, who proceeded to target Socialist voters, campaign workers, health
clinics, newly-built low-income housing projects and Cuban doctors and nurses.
The “white terror” resulted in 8 deaths and 70
injuries. Over 135 right-wing street thugs were arrested and 90 were charged
with felonies, conspiracy to commit murder and destroy public property. Capriles,
violent political credentials go back at least a decade earlier when he played
a major role in the bloody coup which briefly overthrew President Hugo Chavez
in 2002. Capriles led a gang of armed thugs and assaulted the Cuban embassy,
‘arresting’ legitimate Cabinet ministers who had taken refuge. After a combined
military and popular mass movement restored President Chavez, Capriles was
placed under arrest for violence and treason. The courageous Venezuelan
Attorney General, Danilo Anderson, was in the process of prosecuting Capriles
and several hundred of his terrorist supporters when he was assassinated by a
car bomb – planted by supporters of the failed coup.
Though Capriles electoral propaganda was given
a face-lift – he even called himself a candidate of the “center-left” and a
supporter of several of President Chavez’s “social missions”, his close ties
with terrorist operatives were revealed by his call for violent action as
soon as his electoral defeat was announced. His thinly veiled threat to
organize a “mass march” and seize the headquarters of the electoral offices was
only called off when the government ordered the National Guard and the Armed
Forces on high alert. Clearly Capriles’ terror tactics were only pulled back in
the face of greater force. When the legal order decided to defend democracy and
not yield to terrorist blackmail, Capriles temporarily suspended violent
activity and regrouped his forces, allowing the legal-electoral face of his
movement to come to the fore.
Responses to
Terror: Boston and Venezuela
In response to the terrorist incident in
Boston, the local, state and federal police were mobilized and literally shut
down the entire city and its transport networks and went on a comprehensive and
massive ‘manhunt’: the mass media and the entire population were transformed into
tools of a police state investigation. Entire blocks and neighborhoods were
scoured as thousands of heavily armed police and security forces went house to
house, room to room, dumpster to dumpster looking for a wounded 19 year old
college freshman. A terror alert was raised for the entire country ad overseas
police networks and intelligence agencies were involved in the search for the
terrorist assassins. The media and the government constantly showed photos of
the victims, emphasizing their horrific injuries and the gross criminality of
the act: it was unthinkable to discuss any political dimensions to the act – it
was presented, pure and simple, as an act of political terror directed at
‘cowering the American people and their elected government’. Every government
official demanded that anyone, even remotely linked, to the crime or criminals
face the full force of the law.
On the other hand and coinciding with the
attack in Boston, when the Venezuelan oppositionist terrorists launched their
violent assault on the citizens and public institutions they were given
unconditional support by the Obama regime, which claimed the killers were
really ‘democrats seeking to uphold free elections’. Secretary of State Kerry
refused to recognize the electoral victory of President Maduro. Despite the
carnage, the Venezuelan government did not declare martial law: at most the
National Guard and loyalist police upheld the law and arrested several dozen
protestors and terrorists; many of the former – not directly linked to violence
- were quickly released. Moreover, despite the internationally certified
elections by over 100 observers, the Maduro government conceded the chief
demand for an electoral recount – in the hope of averting further right-wing
bloodshed.
US Media Response
All the major Western news agencies, including
the principle ‘respectable’ print media (Financial Times, New York Times and
Washington Post) converted the Venezuelan political assassins into ‘peaceful
protestors’ who were victimized for attempting to register their dissent. In
other words, Washington and the entire media came out in full force in favor of
political terror perpetrated against an adversarial democratic government,
while invoking a near-martial law state for a brutal, but limited, act of
terror in the US. Washington apparently does not make the connection between
its support of terrorism abroad and its spread to the US.
The US media has blocked out discussion of the
ties between Chechen terrorist front groups, based in the US and UK, and
leading US neoconservatives and Zionists, including Rudolph Giuliani, Richard
Perle, Kenneth Adleman, Elliott Abrams, Midge Dector, Frank Gaffney and R.
James Woolsey – all leading members of the self-styled ‘American Committee for
Peace in Chechnya’ (re-named Committee for Peace in the Caucasus after the
horrific Beslan school massacre). These Washington luminaries are all
full-throated supporters of the ‘war on terror’ or should we say supporters of
‘terror and war’ (“Chechen Terrorists and the Neocons” by former FBI official
Coleen Rowley 4/19/13). The headquarters and nerve center for many ‘exile’
Chechen leaders, long sought by Russian authorities for mass terrorist
activities, is Boston, Massachusetts – the site of the bombing – another ‘fact’
thus far ignored by the FBI and the Justice Department, perhaps because of
long-standing and on-going working relations in organizing terrorist incidents
aimed at destabilizing Russia.
Former Presidential candidate and New York
City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, after the bombing, stated that Chechens ‘were only
focused (sic) on Russia’ and not on the US (his Chechens perhaps). Interpol and
US intelligence Agencies are well aware that Chechen militants have been
involved in several Al Qaeda terrorist groups throughout South and Central Asia
as well as the Middle East. The Russian government’s specific inquiries
regarding any number of suspected Chechen terrorists or fronts have been given
short shrift – apparently including the activities of one Tamerlan Tsarnaev,
recently deceased.
(As a historical aside (and perhaps not
unrelated), the Boston-based FBI was notorious from the 1970’s through the
1990’s for protecting a brutal gangster hit man, James ‘Whitey’ Bulger, as a
privileged informant, while he murdered dozens of individuals in the New
England area.)
The Deeper
Meaning of the War on Terrorism
US support for Venezuelan terrorists and their
political leader, Henrique Capriles, is part of a complex multi-track policy
combining the exploitation of electoral processes and the clandestine funding
of NGO’s for “grass roots” agitation of local grievances, together with support
for ‘direct action’ including ‘trial runs’ of political violence against the
symbols and institutions of social democracy. The versatile Capriles is the perfect
candidate to run in elections while orchestrating terror. Past US experience
with political terror in Latin America has had a boomerang effect – as evident
in the Miami-based Cuban terrorist engagement with numerous bombings,
gun-running and drug trafficking within the USA, especially the 1976 car
bombing assassination of the exile Chilean Minister Orlando Letelier and an
American associate on Embassy Row in the heart of Washington, DC – an action
never characterized as ‘terrorism’ because of official US ties to the
perpetrators.
Despite financial, political and military
links between Washington and terrorists, especially fundamentalists, the latter
retain their organizational autonomy and follow their own political-cultural
agenda, which in most cases is hostile to the US. As far as the Chechens, the
Afghans and the Al Qaeda Syrians today are concerned, the US is a tactical
ally to be discarded on the road to establishing independent fundamentalist
states. We should add the scores of Boston victims to the thousands of US
citizens killed in New York, Washington, Libya, Afghanistan and elsewhere by
former fundamentalist allies of the US.
By siding with terrorists and their political
spokespeople and refusing to recognize the validity of the elections in
Venezuela, the Obama regime has totally alienated itself from all of South
America and the Caribbean. By supporting violent assaults against democratic
institutions in Venezuela, the White House is signaling to its clients in
opposition to the governments of Argentina, Bolivia and Ecuador – that violent
assaults against independent democratic governments is an acceptable road to
restoring the neo-liberal order and US centered ‘regional integration’.
Conclusion
Washington has demonstrated no consistent
opposition to terrorism – it depends on the political goals of the terrorists
and on the target adversaries. In one of the two recent cases – the US
government declared virtual “martial law” on Boston to kill or capture two
terrorists who had attacked US citizens in a single locale; whereas in the case
of Venezuela, the Obama regime has given political and material support to
terrorists in order to subvert the entire constitutional order and electoral
regime.
Because of the long-standing and deep ties
between the US State Department, prominent neo-con leaders and Zionist
notables with Chechen terrorists, we cannot expect a thorough investigation
which would surely embarrass or threaten the careers of the major US officials
who have long-term working relations with such criminals.
The White House will escalate and widen its
support for the same Venezuelan terrorists who have sabotaged the electrical
power system, the food supply and the constitutional electoral process of that
country. Terror, in that context, serves as its launch pad for a full scale
assault against the past decade’s social advances under the late President Hugo
Chavez.
Meanwhile, in order to cover-up the
Chechen-Washington working alliance, the Boston Marathon bombing will be
reduced to an isolated act by two misguided youths, lead astray by an anonymous
fundamentalist website – their actions reduced to ‘religious fundamentalism’. And
despite an economy in crisis, tens of billions of more dollars will be
allocated to expand the police state at home, citing its effectiveness and
efficiency in the aftermath of the bombings while secretly sending more
millions to foment ‘democratic’ terror…in Venezuela.
