Washington's Dark Secret: The Real Truth about Terrorism and Islamic Extremism
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Washington's Dark Secret: The Real Truth about Terrorism and Islamic Extremism
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Overview
Because the United States’ current approach to terrorism has led to the politicization and abuse of the term, Maszka suggests a need for a standardized definition of terrorism. Currently, too many acts of violence can be labeled terrorism, resulting in state and nonstate actors labeling their enemies as “terrorists,” yet claiming their own acts of violence as legitimate and retributive. Maszka argues that much of the violence labeled as terrorism today is not terrorism at all. In an ambitious attempt to connect seemingly unrelated events in politics and the media, Maszka offers an unflinching portrayal of the hypocrisy underlying our foreign policy.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781640121096 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Potomac Books |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 304 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Who's the Enemy?
I see God in every human being.
— Mother Teresa
The Tree of Life
The famous Persian poet Rumi once told the story of a king who sent his servant to find the tree of life and bring him back some of its fruit. The servant searched for months throughout every corner of the king's realm, but never found the tree of life. Exhausted and ashamed, the servant decided to give up and return to the king empty-handed.
On his way back, he saw a hill and remembered that a wise man lived at the top. The servant climbed the hill and inquired about the tree of life.
"What you are looking for exists," the wise man assured him. "Your mistake was to try to find a form with a name."
Smiling, he gently placed his hand on the servant's shoulder. "Go back and tell the king that he need not worry about finding the fruit from some magic tree. Rather, instruct him to be fair and just to his people. If he does this, no one will ever forget him."
In many ways the current understanding of sensational violence is like the search for the tree of life. People see coverage on the news and just accept that it is what the mainstream media and politicians tell them it is — never once considering that it may be something else entirely.
People have a certain idea in their heads, so they see the Islamic State behind every attack. Meanwhile, rather than governing with justice and integrity, policy makers appropriate billions to fight an enemy that doesn't even exist — at least not in the form that's been popularized by the mainstream media. In the process they victimize the world's most vulnerable, trample on human rights, and then wonder why they're held in contempt. The situation is so ridiculous that it would actually be comical if it weren't so dire.
The Boston Marathon Bombings
When the Boston Marathon bombings occurred in April 2013, I was the director of international relations at a university in Tokmok, Kyrgyzstan. Like many things in this world, Tokmok is both beautiful and harsh at the same time. The city is landlocked by sharp, exquisite mountain ranges, so living there is hard and life itself is a miracle. The people are warm and proud and strong. They love foreigners, yet they're always a little suspicious of strangers.
In Kyrgyz the word tokmok means punishment. At one time Stalin exiled political dissidents to this place (the fortunate ones, anyway). In fact Stalin displaced the entire Chechen population after Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in a desperate bid for oil. Suspecting the Chechens of collaborating with the Nazis, Uncle Joe deported them en masse to Central Asia. The Tsarnaev family was among them.
Chechnya has a long history of resistance against its Russian occupiers. The region that today is known as the Caucasus had been in dispute between the Persian and the Russian empires since 1796, changing hands in a series of territorial conflicts. Chechnya was eventually ceded to Russia in 1813, but the Chechens didn't take too kindly to the new arrangement. Their story has since been one of suffering and a bloody struggle against foreign occupation. The Chechens were allowed to return to their homeland in the 1950s under Khrushchev's de-Stalinization program, but oil remained a contentious issue. To this day Chechnya is a major front in Russia's war on terror. Following the two devastating Chechen wars, the region continues to be a tinderbox as East and West vie for access and control of its vital resource.
The two Tsarnaev brothers who were accused of committing the Boston Marathon bombings had gone to elementary school at a madrassa right down the road from my office. Madrassa, of course, is simply the Arabic word for school (in Russian, schkola). However, after 9/11 the word has taken on a diabolical connotation as a breeding center for Islamic terrorists.
For the first few weeks after the attacks, the community expressed genuine fear that the United States would retaliate with a drone strike. In the people's eyes America was the real threat, not the two Tsarnaev boys, whom most still remembered as children who grew up among them. To this day many insist that the two brothers were framed.
One of my students at the university had a sister who worked for a nongovernmental organization (NGO) in Afghanistan. He had grown accustomed to checking in on her frequently and was all too familiar with the reality (and frequency) of U.S. drone strikes against civilian targets.
That very same month, the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI) entered Syria, claimed control of vast oil fields, and changed its name to the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS). ISIS changed its name again to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), and on June 29, 2014, the group officially became the Islamic State (IS) after announcing the establishment of a new caliphate.
Given these events the world largely forgot about the Boston Marathon bombings, but I never forgot the feeling of living and working so close to ground zero of a potential U.S. target. Every day as I walked past Schkola no. 1 before and after work, the school-age children would run up to me, laughing and wanting to practice their English. My wife and I knew many of them personally as we used to give free English lessons at the library every Saturday. I tried not to think about the fact that the entire school and the surrounding blocks could be eliminated — in the blink of an eye — by someone sitting behind a simulator with a cup of coffee seven thousand miles away. But I knew better.
David Koresh and the Branch Davidians
The single most common question I'm asked is "Why do you study terrorism?" I guess the best response is that I don't study terrorism — I study people. After all, it isn't the violence per se that's interesting (although violence certainly attracts the media); it's the people behind the violence that fascinate me.
I had originally thought that I wanted to study literature. After enrolling in a PhD program, I quickly realized that reading about other people's experiences would never be enough — I needed my own adventures. You know what they say though ... be careful what you wish for.
Studying people is a lot like walking on the beach — you never know what's going to wash up. I learned this lesson during my first ethnographic study when I lived with David Koresh and the Branch Davidians.
Two friends of mine had joined the sect a few months earlier. Moved by Koresh's charisma, they exclaimed, "We've found the Messiah! David Koresh from Waco, Texas."
"Can any good thing come from Waco?" I replied skeptically.
"Come and see!"
The next thing I knew, I was on a plane. At that time the Branch Davidians had three compounds: one in Waco, one in Los Angeles, and one in Honolulu. My two friends invited me to come and stay with them in Honolulu. Little did I realize that they had over a dozen roommates (and another dozen or so sect members lived in the apartment next door).
At first the sect seemed like a tight-knit group — all true believers and fiercely loyal to Koresh. But things are not always as they seem. It turned out that one of the "members" was only staying there for the cheap rent. He wasn't at all convinced by Koresh and his message concerning the soon-approaching apocalypse. Still, this particular individual was remarkably well-informed regarding Koresh's plans.
He revealed to me that the groups in LA and Honolulu were planning to move to Waco, where the sect would prepare for the end. The Branch Davidians believed that, like the Levites in the days of Moses, God was about to command them to slay the wicked — beginning with the members of the Christian churches. He also told me that I should get out of there before I got killed: "Some of these nutcases are just itching to start killing."
I decided to take his advice seriously, but there was someone I needed to take with me. Another member — a Samoan woman in her late teens who had recently joined the group. She confided in me that she had been trying to contact her father because she was frightened and wanted to go home. The newer members were all monitored very closely, however, and no one was allowed to leave.
We plotted our escape, and the next day we simply ran away. Several sect members chased us, but we were able to dodge them in the crowded streets. Ducking inside a busy pizza parlor, we ordered a pie and called her father. The group packed up and moved to Waco soon afterward, and the rest is history. To the best of my knowledge, everyone in the Honolulu group died except the two members mentioned above. It still makes me sad.
Were they terrorists? No. They had no political aspirations. They weren't attempting to obtain concessions from the government or provoke a reaction. They simply believed that they were "wave sheaves" — first fruits of God — and that they would be instrumental in ushering in the apocalypse. They were no more terrorists than the school shooter at Northern Illinois University (NIU) who killed himself along with five others and wounded twenty-one more.
The Saint Valentine's Day Massacre
Most people don't remember the NIU shooting because, let's be honest, there have been so many it's hard to keep track of them all. I remember it though. I was on campus that day. It was the fourteenth of February 2008 — Valentine's Day. The air was filled with the expectation of gifts and love and romance. But no one expected a jaded ex-boyfriend to seek revenge by opening fire on an auditorium full of students.
The scene was surreal. First the gunshots, then the screaming and the blood ... and then the helicopters arrived. For some reason the sound of the helicopters hovering above us stuck in my mind. Like the shutter on a camera, their propellers sliced the frenzied motion on the ground below into still-life mementos — isolating each second one from the next. They were like a swarm of locusts feeding on the story, and we were the main course.
When you go into shock, your mind shuts down. You're still conscious, but every moment occurs in a vacuum. Nothing seems connected to anything else. The tinted glasses through which you normally view reality are torn from your eyes, and for a brief moment you experience every sensation in its purest form. The clarity is beyond description, and yet you don't feel anything at all.
I recall students running and screaming — and others lying perfectly still. Before I was able to wrap my mind around what had happened, it was over. The entire campus was on lockdown for over a week — held under siege by a battalion of police investigators and news helicopters. I found out later that one of my interns was killed in the attack.
The shooter wasn't a terrorist. Whatever he wanted, it wasn't political concessions. If it was attention he craved, he certainly received it. It's truly unfortunate that the media is so willing to make such people into instant celebrities. Some of our young people are literally dying for attention.
The June 2016 shooting at a nightclub in Orlando, Florida, is a case in point. Because it was the worst mass shooting in U.S. history, the media milked all the hype it could get out of the story (which in today's currency is headlines for a few days). This wasn't a terrorist attack, however. What concessions were demanded? Besides, no true IS operative calls 911 and confesses to be a member during an attack. This was clearly a case of a disturbed young man seeking his five minutes of fame. Again, the media was more than happy to oblige.
Friends from Afar
I grew up in a small midwestern town in the United States — just about as far from Africa as one can imagine (in every conceivable way). Oddly enough I met Da'uud (David), my first Somali friend, right there in that same small town. I was a freshman at the university, working the overnight shift at a local Kinko's copy shop, trying to make ends meet. The fall semester had barely just begun.
In the wee hours of the morning, a dark, thin man with bloodshot eyes entered the lobby and moved slowly toward the counter. Articulate and soft-spoken with a flat affect, Da'uud appeared to be in his midforties. He handed me a thick packet and inquired about sending a fax.
I opened the envelope routinely and began to flip through the pages. "You want to fax all of this?" I questioned, glancing up as I passed him a cover sheet.
"Yes," he replied quietly. "I need to fax it to this number here."
The number Da'uud gave me belonged to the U.S. Embassy in Kenya. The document contained over 150 pages of names, dates, and photos of charred corpses and bodies that had been hacked to pieces. At first I was afraid to ask, but the fax was taking so long that the silence began to feel awkward.
"What happened?" I mumbled under my breath, not realizing that he could hear me.
The pain in his eyes spoke volumes. In a thick Somali accent, he explained that his family had been attacked in their home while they were sleeping. The attackers raped his sisters and brutally hacked several of his brothers to death. Those who managed to escape were scattered and fled on foot to Kenya. One by one the survivors found one another in the huge refugee camp that would become their home for nearly a year.
This had all happened while Da'uud was attending university in the States. Forced to drop out of school, he'd been working three jobs for the past six months: one job to provide for his wife and two children in America; a second job to support his parents and surviving siblings and their children in Kenya; and a third job to pay for the daily faxes.
Da'uud had been applying for refugee status for his family so that they could come to the U.S. and live with him. But the red tape was such that after faxing the documents every day for six months, he'd gotten nowhere.
When the fax finally transmitted, Da'uud reached for his wallet. "$78.50?" he confirmed with the confidence of someone who'd done this many times before.
"No, please," I insisted, pretending to have an employee discount. "Let me take care of it."
An expression that faintly resembled a smile appeared on his face. "You would do that?"
I tried to answer, but the words got stuck in my throat. So I just nodded in the affirmative. Offering a reciprocal nod, he turned to leave. Suddenly a wave of compassion mixed with outrage washed over me.
"W-why don't I just fax the document every night when I come in to work?" The words didn't come out as smoothly as I would have liked, but at least this time I managed to say something.
Da'uud looked stunned. He didn't say a word. I didn't know him, and he didn't know me, but at that very moment we became brothers, and we both knew it. Feeling the need to lighten the mood, I quipped, "Besides, you need to start saving your money for airline tickets."
"Yes," he exhaled, and I finally saw him smile.
Hope is an amazingly powerful force. For the next six months, I actually looked forward to going to work. During that time I poured over the report of his family, staring at their photos and reading the details of their lives until I felt as though I knew them personally.
The attack took place under the cover of an undeclared war — launched by the U.S. against the army of General Muhammad Farah Aideed, a warlord who had been instrumental in toppling the Barre regime.
An alliance of clan militias armed with American and Soviet military-grade weapons drove Barre from power. With Barre out of the way, fighting broke out between the militias themselves as they spewed their venom on each other. Egypt cosponsored a conference in Djibouti in which an interim government was set up, and Ali Mahdi Muhammad (a wealthy hotel proprietor) was named as interim president. Aideed rejected the agreement and took control of the southern part of Mogadishu. Meanwhile, Ali Mahdi retained control of the northern districts. A green line initially divided the two camps, but the civil war disintegrated even further into all-out clan warfare as clans and subclans fought for control over scarce resources.
The civil war posed a serious threat to extensive ongoing oil prospecting operations in Somalia by Conoco, Amoco, Phillips, and Chevron. These American corporations had invested a considerable amount of time and money in Somalia, but the political instability in the region forced three of them to cut their losses and pull out. Only Conoco remained.
The Conoco compound effectively served as the U.S. embassy. Not only did Conoco provide intelligence for the American military; the company also assisted in planning the logistics for the U.S. Marine landing in December 1992. Coincidentally, longtime Washington insider Richard Armitage (former assistant secretary of defense, former deputy secretary of state) also serves on Conoco's board of directors.
While the U.S. originally backed Aideed, it switched sides after one of Aideed's key allies, Omar Jess, lost control of Kismayo. In return Mahdi offered Conoco exclusive oil rights after the war. Thus, the intervention of twenty-eight thousand (mostly American) forces largely turned into a bilateral war between the United States and Aideed's coalition.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Washington's Dark Secret"
by .
Copyright © 2018 John Maszka.
Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Preface Introduction: The Notorious D. J. Trump Abbreviations Chapter One. Who’s the Enemy? Chapter Two. The First Act of Terrorism Chapter Three. The Meaning of Jihad Chapter Four. The Crime of the Century Chapter Five. The Road to Perdition Chapter Six. The Iraq Wars Chapter Seven. From Bin Laden to Baghdadi Chapter Eight. Utter Confusion Chapter Nine. Navigating the Deluge Chapter Ten. A Cultural Compass Chapter Eleven. The Colors of Conflict Chapter Twelve. The Definition of Insanity Glossary Notes Bibliography Index