Creating Terrorism

The Pentagon Plan to Provoke Terrorist Attacks on Counterpunch talks about the latest plan for “rooting out evildoers”. The report, prepared for Rumsfeld by the Defense Science Board, plans to create a new organization, whose duty it will be, in the most Orwellian possible fashion, to find terrorists, even if they must be created first.

“new organization—the “Proactive, Preemptive Operations Group (P2OG)”—will carry out secret missions designed to “stimulate reactions” among terrorist groups, provoking them into committing violent acts which would then expose them to “counterattack” by U.S. forces.”

As Mr. Floyd points out, and this hardly needs saying, “the Rumsfeld way of combating terrorism by causing it is pure moral lunacy”. The logic behind it could only be put forth as plausible by an administration already convinced of their constituency’s feeble powers of reasoning. It’s the kind of logic that emulates Escher’s steps: it seems to be building toward some higher ground, but it’s just an illlusion; in reality it goes nowhere and proves nothing. This is analogous to a traffic cop kicking out a taillight in order to be able to catch the “right” criminals. It seems you can get away with whatever you need to these days as long as you make at least a half-hearted effort to justify it. Enter pre-made justifications, handy for whatever situation you see fit to use them in.

In effect, that means that we know there exist terrorists that just haven’t terrorized anything yet. More precisely, they have views that don’t coincide with ours, and, rather than compromise in any way, our plan is to beat them into a violent reaction, then turn around and beat them to death, claiming that they are too dangerous to let live. Hmmm….this seems a rather fatuous way of getting rid of people with whom you don’t agree, no? All this while making it appear to be all their fault, especially when a compliant media herds the public along into ignoring the initial provokation.

It’s similar to the person who kicks a dog every day, then has the dog put down as dangerous, when, 10 years later, it finally attacks him. The question of whether those people would have engaged in terrorism had they not been provoked into it as a desperate last measure is never asked.