War on Terrorism Expanding Faster Than the Universe

US increases covert actions

Voice of America

Although it is not publicly documented, it appears the United States is increasingly relying on covert actions against the enemy in the War on Terrorism.

One of the first hints of the possible use of covert operations came last May, when John Brennan, Assistant to President Obama for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism spoke to a gathering at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. His topic…the President's National Security Strategy, which was scheduled to be released the next day.

Brennan said the United States would take the fight to Al Qaida and its extremist affiliates wherever they plot and train: in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and beyond. He added, "In all our efforts, we will exercise force prudently, recognizing that we often need to use a scalpel and not a hammer."

VOA sought to get an official government reaction to the reports of expended covert operations. We were told by a US official that "it's hardly a secret that we're engaged in a serious fight against a brutal, determined and adaptive enemy or that we may need to taylor our strategies to keep ahead of them. The threat we face is global, so the response can't be narrow, and we have to rely on all of the tools at our disposal to confront terrorists who are plotting against us and our allies."

Perhaps the most well publicized covert battle is the use of drone aircraft targeting terrorists in Pakistan. But there are also reports of operations is Yemen, in parts of Africa, and in Afghanistan.

Daniel Markey, a Senior Fellow for India, Pakistan and South Asia at the Council for Foreign Relations told VOA that it was his sense that U.S. special forces operations have expanded radically in Afghanistan, although he said it was less clear to him precisely what that has meant for operations in Pakistan.

As to just who is participating in these operations, Markey said it was his sense that there are a range of different American actors involved. Some are contractors, he said, some are definitely special forces, and some fall more in the category of agency, CIA and so on. Insofar as the number of people are involved in the operations, the Council for Foreign Relations scholar said he had no sense for what the absolute numbers are, but from what he had seen and heard, it is a significant upsurge over the past year in Afghanistan.

There are some arguments being made against such covert operations. Some say it fuels anti American rage among local populations, others say it could blur the lines between soldiers and spies, muddying the protections provided by the Geneva Conventions. But there also seems to be growing support for the covert war. One US politician, Congressman Adam Smith, is quoted by the New York Times as saying "for the first time in our history, an entity has declared a covert war against us … and we are using similar elements of American power to respond to that covert war.”

True to his Promise, Obama Expands "War on Terror"

Well, he's done it again, just like he said he would

By Peter Symonds

A lengthy article in the New York Times, A Secret Assault on Terrorism Widens on Two Continents has provided a glimpse into the extent of the Obama administration’s covert wars.

Obama has not only continued but has expanded the murderous operations that were waged under the banner of the “war on terror” by the CIA and Pentagon during the Bush administration.

As the authors explain: “In roughly a dozen countries—from the deserts of North Africa, to the mountains of Pakistan, to former Soviet republics [in Central Asia] crippled by ethnic and religious strife, the United States has significantly increased military and intelligence operations, pursuing the enemy using robotic drones and commando teams, paying contractors to spy and training local operatives to chase terrorists.”

Obama has dramatically intensified the CIA’s drone missile attacks against alleged insurgents inside areas of Pakistan bordering Afghanistan.

The White House has “approved raids inside Somalia,” it has “carried out clandestine operations from Kenya,” and it has collaborated with European allies in covert operations in North Africa, including a recent French strike in Algeria.

The most detailed information concerns the Obama administration’s expanding covert war inside Yemen, where the US military has carried out four air strikes since last December.

The war has killed dozens of civilians, including the deputy governor of Marib Province, Jabir al Shabwani, in May. The article incidentally confirms what has not previously been acknowledged: that all of the air strikes were carried out by the United States.

These attacks are just one aspect of American operations inside Yemen. “The Pentagon and the CIA have quietly bulked up the number of their operatives at the embassy in Sanaa, the Yemeni capital, over the past year,” the Times explains.

The US is also training elite Yemeni units, providing equipment and sharing intelligence to support Yemeni operations against Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

While the Times article acknowledges some political risks are involved, it is uncritical, even laudatory in tone. Under the banner of the “war on terror,” the US is aggressively prosecuting its ambitions for strategic and economic dominance throughout the energy-rich regions of the Middle East and Central Asia.

The neo-colonial occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan have been extended into a series of covert wars aimed at consolidating the American presence and expanding Washington’s political influence.

In Yemen, the Obama administration is helping to prop up the dictatorial regime of President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who is notorious for his suppression of political opposition. He came to power in what was North Yemen in 1978 and now runs a unified Yemen as a family fiefdom.

The Yemeni military and security apparatus, which Washington is training and equipping, is firmly under the control of Saleh’s family members, who will undoubtedly use its improved capacities against political opponents and critics.

Obama’s secret wars are proceeding with little or no congressional oversight and scant regard for international or American law. As the Times pointed out, the White House is benefitting from “a unique political landscape,” with support from Republicans and Democrats alike.

Earlier this year, the Pakistani newspaper, the Dawn, reported that at least 700 Pakistani civilians were killed in the CIA’s drone missile attacks during 2009.

According to Amnesty International, the first US strike on Yemen last December was a cruise missile loaded with cluster bombs that killed more than 40 civilians over several days. None of these crimes has raised a murmur of opposition in the US political or media establishment.

Speaking to the Times, former top CIA officer Jack Devine raised concerns that the limited congressional oversight put in place after the notorious Iran-Contra affair in the 1980s.

That involved the illegal funneling of money from secret arms sales to Iran to right-wing Contra rebels in Nicaragua—had been weakened. For the current covert operations, he said, “there are not clear rules.”

Under the Obama administration, the Times explained, the Pentagon has expanded its covert missions, which “typically operate with even less transparency and congressional oversight than traditional covert operations by the CIA.”

The article reported: “Across the Middle East and elsewhere, Special Operations troops under secret ‘Execute Orders’ have conducted spying missions that were once the preserve of civilian intelligence agencies.”

Not surprisingly, the CIA and military operatives involved in US imperialism’s past crimes are directing or intimately involved in the present operations.

Former CIA agent Duane Clarridge, who was indicted in 1991 in connection with the Iran-Contra affair, reemerged in Pakistan, helping to run one of several Pentagon-funded contractors providing intelligence to the US military.

Assistant Secretary of Defense Michael Vickers, who oversees the Pentagon’s expanding Special Operation Command, was a senior CIA agent who helped direct its huge covert war to oust the Soviet-backed regime in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

The CIA helped arm and train not only the Afghan mujahedin, but also assisted the thousands of Islamist militants from the Middle East, North Africa and Asia who passed through Al Qaeda (the Base) to fight in Afghanistan.

Vickers, along with Defense Secretary (and former CIA head) Robert Gates, was one of several top officials appointed by Bush and kept in place by Obama.

In a sign of things to come, Obama last month appointed John Bennett to head the CIA’s National Clandestine Service, formerly known as the Directorate of Operations.

Among his previous assignments, Bennett headed the CIA’s Special Activities Division, which handles highly sensitive spying and paramilitary missions. According to Newsweek, his last posting was as CIA station chief in Islamabad, where he was intimately involved in supervising drone missile strikes inside Pakistan.

Obama’s expansion of covert operations into some of the world’s most unstable countries and regions is reckless and inflammatory.

His extension of the Afghan war into neighboring Pakistan, for instance, has not only undermined the government in Islamabad and triggered a dangerous civil war, but is destabilising relations with India and throughout the Indian subcontinent.

As the US aggressively pursues its interests through military means—overt and covert—its actions cut directly across the strategic interests of other major powers such as China, and threaten to provoke broader conflicts.

In Guantanamo, Justice Denied

In Guantanamo

By David Miller

The Inside Story

By Yvonne Ridley

Guantanamo Bay is, without doubt, the world’s most notorious prison, which has left an indelible stain on the Bush administration.
One of the first acts of U.S. President Barack Obama was to order its closure and there is speculation that some of the detainees may now be offered asylum in Wales.

I am one of the few journalists to visit the sprawling naval base.

I traveled there with filmmaker David Miller, whose documentary “Guantanamo: Inside the Wire” is to be screened tomorrow.

I was invited by the U.S. military to Cuba to see the camp from the inside for myself… it was an offer I could not refuse.

The immediate reaction when I told people about my assignment was: Why on earth did they let you, of all people, in there?

A valid question, indeed. Why would the American military extend such an invite to an anti-war activist, peace campaigner, journalist, and vociferous critic of the War on Terror?

In truth I don’t have an answer, but I am eternally gratefully that the Joint Task Force did let me spend four days at their U.S. Naval Base and, more importantly, let me out again!

I suppose it all began last year when Birmingham neurologist Dr. David Nicholl expressed his concerns about the medical ethics and challenges faced by the doctors employed inside the prison during a discussion show I was presenting for Press TV.

As part of my research I telephoned the base and asked to speak to a senior doctor, but the press officer at JTF-GTMO said this was impossible. A heated conversation ensued as I dropped in the words “torture and water-boarding” and from there we moved to discuss the Hippocratic Oath and medical ethics.

Clearly irritated at my challenging questions, he then read out, in a very loud voice, the entire contents of the oath which is signed by every newly qualified doctor around the world.

After making it clear I was singularly unimpressed, he then barked the invite: “Well why don’t you come over and see the medical facilities for yourself and talk to the doctors?”

Once he made clear it was not going to be a one-way ticket and I could take a cameraman, I agreed. And so, after five months of personal vetting, I and filmmaker David Miller boarded a pea-shooter of a plane run by Air Sunshine at Miami, destination Guantanamo.

We had read and filled in lots of forms before setting off, forms which would make any self-respecting journalist balk, but the option was simple -- no signature, no ticket.

By signing one particular document I guess we signed away all our rights to the contents of David’s camera.

The first night we stayed in comfortable accommodation, segregated, on the naval base and then the next day we started our mission after being given more rules and regulations.

I was told: The ground rules are established to ensure protected information such as classified information, intelligence collections capabilities, and sources and methods are not compromised and to protect the security of commission participants by preserving anonymity.

It was also made perfectly clear what would happen if the rules were breached: expulsion. In addition, disclosure of classified information could result in a criminal prosecution. Let’s face it, David and I had no option but to comply.

We could not film or identify any staff without their permission -- some of the guards genuinely believe Al-Qaeda will track them down to their civilian homes and kill them and their families.

Security is as heightened as the paranoia, real or imagined, of all those serving at JTF-GTMO.

Section 8 of the media ground rules states:

The following media activities are prohibited and may be subject to embargo:

a. No front facial shots of detainees may be taken at any time, even with the intent of distorting or hiding facial images during production and broadcast. Front facial shots at distances are prohibited. Photos of other features considered distinguishing that could lead to the identity of a detainee may be prohibited by the Public Affairs Officer on scene and embargoed if discovered during the security review.

b. No audio, video recordings, photographs or other electronic images, or drawings, sketches or likenesses may be rendered of any detainee when that image or recording may reveal that detainee’s identity or nationality. Identities and nationalities of any detainee will not be disclosed unless previously released by OASD (PA).

Each evening David Miller went through the agony of replaying every single frame that he had shot during the day to a civilian officer who would then censor the contents if he felt it breached the rules.

For someone who has filmed and worked in Iraq under the watchful Saddam regime and the ever-controlling states of Saudi Arabia and Syria, I have to say I had never before experienced this degree of scrutiny.

Nor did I have as many military minders as I did when I made my way around Guantanamo. It was a reflection, I believe, of the general state of paranoia which is evident across American society as a result of whipping up fear over George W. Bush’s seemingly never-ending War on Terror, and I felt very sad that this fear was having such an impact in a country which used to boast about civil rights, freedoms, and liberties.

Hopefully, the new man in the White House will engage his people through empowerment and not use the politics of fear.

Of course, I know what you really want me to write about is what I saw inside the prison itself. Well, I can tell you that despite all the restrictions, I did get into Camp Delta and was given unprecedented access to camps 4, 5, and 6, the last two being part of the shining new, maximum security facility.

Our film goes out tomorrow, so I don’t want to give too much away before it premieres, but we did see some detainees, and heard the painful cries of others in the so-called “non-compliant” wing.

We were not allowed to talk to or interview them, nor were we allowed to film their faces. Our media minder told us that the Department of Defense policies prohibit the filming/recording of detainees in a way which would identify them.

Our mission is to ensure the detainee is protected under this policy, explained one of our minders.

Bizarrely, some of the most stringent security presented itself when we went to Camp Justice (trust me there is no irony when these names are created). At first we were told the area was off-limits and then we were allowed to film a tight shot of the sign but were forbidden from taking a camera, any camera, inside the court room where the military tribunals are taking place.

This place is already defunct after the new U.S. president ended the military tribunals with immediate effect. Too late for the Yemeni Salim Hamdan, who has already been tried and sentenced for his role as Osama bin Laden’s driver.

For two days we were shown around the detention facilities and in to the medical and library wings. One of the most popular books on loan is from the Harry Potter series and the National Geographic magazines are also highly prized.

The intellectual content of the detainees’ library is a sharp contrast to the contents of the on-base shop, which offers such picture-led magazines and videos with titles including Hooters and Debbie Does Dallas. We were not allowed to film the reading material of the off-duty military.

As I walked through the old Camp X-Ray, I had to tear away at the creepers and leafy tentacles which held the cages tightly closed -- most are now overgrown with weeds and vines.

The only occupants are snakes and banana rats, so named because of the curious shaped droppings these large nocturnal rodents leave behind.

My minders told me that they are most keen the rest of the world forgets the images of orange-clad detainees being wheeled around the cages of Camp X-Ray to the interrogation block, which was open from January to April 2002.

And they felt that by giving us access to the new prison nestling on the edge of a bay and surrounded by razor and barbed wire, that we would go away satisfied that the treatment of the detainees was humane and had improved.

I’m sorry, but what I saw did not make me rest easy at all. In some ways the supermax-style prison is grotesque and an affront to civilized society. Every part of the supermax cell is designed to dehumanize and degrade the occupant.

Although I’m not sure who is more humiliated in the non-compliant wing when asking for toilet roll -- the guard who has to count out around eight sheets of tissue paper or the detainee who stands there and watches him do this.

I did get a chance to interview the medical staff and was slightly concerned to learn that more than two thirds of the detainees had undergone colonoscopies -- a medical procedure to examine the inside of the large colon and small bowel using a fiberoptic camera. It is a procedure used mainly on older patients which does not fit the profile of the detainees.

The doctor I spoke to vehemently denied that the detainees were being used as human guineau pigs to enhance their own medical CVs for when army personnel move to civvy street.

I requested an hour to sit down and interview the rear admiral who is in charge of the whole facility. The interview began quite well and he even offered me his pips and resignation if he thought anything untoward was going on during his watch.

But there were a few silences and uneasy pauses as my questions about human rights became more and more challenging. The session was brought to an abrupt end by an overly protective PR man as I got into the arena of the now defunct Camp Iguana where children as young as 12 were once held.

I was assured all the children have long gone, but as Birmingham-based ex-detainee Moazzam Begg told me: “No Yvonne, some of the children are still there, but now they’ve grown up into young men like Omar Khadr.”

My documentary covers the haunting case of Canadian citizen Omar, the last Westerner to remain in Gitmo. I defy anyone to watch the footage we later obtained which shows the child weeping over his blindness and injuries and crying for his mother during an interrogation.

Moazzam Begg is probably the best known prisoner to emerge from the cages of Cuba, but others have also chosen to break their silence for the first time by talking to me on the record for the documentary. Their candid interviews are also included in our film, although some still insisted on remaining in the studio shadows.

Rear Admiral Mark Busby has now moved on from Guantanamo, promoted earlier this month in the last few days of the Bush administration.

The most striking thing which emerged during my interviews with ordinary soldiers right up to the bossman himself was their total commitment to the mission in Guantanamo. I’m curious about their gut reaction to Obama’s swift decision.

They were clearly shocked, almost wounded, when I told them that politicians around the world were calling for its closure --including those sitting in the White House. It was as though they were wrapped in their own cocoon, sealed off and protected from world opinion.

“Honor bound to defend freedom. That is our mission and that is what we believe in,” said one lanky Marine as he stooped to hiss the words slowly in my ear when I questioned the point of the facility and its long-term future.

“Honor Bound” is embellished on virtually every notice board and signpost around Guantanamo Bay. It’s on the coffee mug I was presented with -- bought from the souvenir shop on the base where you can buy everything from a t-shirt to a baseball cap or key ring.

Some notice boards carry a special “value word” which is changed every week. When I was there, the buzzword was: RESPECT. There are still more than 200 men languishing in the facility while hundreds more have passed through the facility, including children.

I know there has been talk that some of the detainees could be given a new home and fresh start in Wales as asylum seekers because it is not safe for them to return to their country of origin. There is a twist of irony that the U.S. has refused to return 16 Uyghurs to China over the issue of human rights.

More than 100 countries have been approached to try to find them a new home where they can resettle. Those countries that refused to accept detainees are now more open to requests from the Obama administration.

What I saw and what David Miller filmed in Guantanamo will haunt us both for the rest of our lives and our “Gitmo experience” lasted only four days, but there are other, more secret prisons around the world.

Lawyer Clive Stafford Smith, who we also feature, reckons there are still around 20,000 prisoners held in U.S. custody, beyond the rule of law, at various locations, including Bagram Air Base, where 680 prisoners are held without any due process.

It is worth remembering that 95 percent of those held in Guantanamo were not picked up from a battlefield, but many were sold like slaves for bounties of $5000; a fact acknowledged in Pakistani General Pervez Musharraf’s autobiography In The Line of Fire.

I hope that our film will move all of you who watch it, and if detainees are released to come and live near you, I also hope you will extend the hand of friendship and not point a finger of suspicion.

Citizens of Oceanea, A Message For You

The Ministry of Obama

By John Pilger

In 1984, George Orwell described a superstate, Oceania, whose language of war inverted lies that "passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past,' ran the party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.'"

Barack Obama is the leader of a contemporary Oceania. In two speeches at the close of the decade, the Nobel Peace Prize-winner affirmed that peace was no longer peace.

Rather, a permanent war that "extends well beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan" to "disorderly regions, failed states, diffuse enemies." He called this "global security" and invited our gratitude.

To the people of Afghanistan, which the U.S. has invaded and occupied, he said wittily: "We have no interest in occupying your country."

In Oceania, truth and lies are indivisible. According to Obama, the American attack on Afghanistan in 2001 was authorized by the United Nations Security Council.

There was no UN authority. He said that "the world" supported the invasion in the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks. In truth, all but three of 37 countries surveyed by Gallup expressed overwhelming opposition.

He said that America invaded Afghanistan "only after the Taliban refused to turn over Osama Bin Laden." In 2001, the Taliban tried three times to hand over Bin Laden for trial, Pakistan's military regime reported, and they were ignored.

Even Obama's mystification of the 9/11 attacks as justification for his war is false. More than two months before the twin towers were attacked, the former Pakistani diplomat Niaz Naik was told by the Bush administration that a U.S. military assault would take place by mid-October.

The Taliban regime in Kabul, which the Clinton administration had secretly supported, was no longer regarded as "stable" enough to ensure U.S. control over oil and gas pipelines to the Caspian Sea. It had to go.

Obama's most audacious lie is that Afghanistan today is a "safe haven" for al-Qaeda's attacks on the West. His own national security adviser, James Jones, said in October that there were "fewer than 100" al-Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan.

According to U.S. intelligence, 90 percent of the Taliban are hardly Taliban at all, but "a tribal localized insurgency [who] see themselves as opposing the U.S. because it is an occupying power." The war is a fraud. Only the terminally gormless remain true to the Obama brand of "world peace."

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BENEATH THE surface, however, there is serious purpose. Under the disturbing Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who gained distinction for his assassination squads in Iraq, the occupation of Afghanistan is a model for those "disorderly regions" of the world still beyond Oceania's reach.

This is known as Coin (counter-insurgency), and draws together the military, aid organizations, psychologists, anthropologists, the media and public relations hirelings. Covered in jargon about winning hearts and minds, it aims to incite civil war: Tajiks and Uzbeks against Pashtuns.

The Americans did this in Iraq and destroyed a multi-ethnic society. They built walls between communities which had once intermarried, ethnically cleansing the Sunnis and driving millions out of the country.

Embedded media reported this as "peace"; American academics bought by Washington and "security experts" briefed by the Pentagon appeared on the BBC to spread the good news. As in 1984, the opposite was true.

Something similar is planned for Afghanistan. People are to be forced into "target areas" controlled by warlords, bankrolled by the CIA and the opium trade. That these warlords are barbaric is irrelevant.

"We can live with that," a Clinton-era diplomat once said of the return of oppressive sharia law in a "stable," Taliban-run Afghanistan.

Favored western relief agencies, engineers and agricultural specialists will attend to the "humanitarian crisis" and so "secure" the subjugated tribal lands.

That is the theory. It worked after a fashion in Yugoslavia, where ethnic-sectarian partition wiped out a once-peaceful society, but it failed in Vietnam.

The CIA's "Strategic Hamlet Program" was designed to corral and divide the southern population and so defeat the Vietcong--the Americans' catch-all term for the resistance, similar to "Taliban."

Behind much of this are the Israelis, who have long advised the Americans in both the Iraq and the Afghanistan adventures.

Ethnic cleansing, wall-building, checkpoints, collective punishment and constant surveillance--these are claimed as Israeli innovations that have succeeded in stealing most of Palestine from its native people.

And yet, for all their suffering, the Palestinians have not been divided irrevocably and they endure as a nation against all odds.

The most telling forerunners of the Obama Plan, which the Nobel Peace Prize-winner and his general and his PR men prefer we forget, are those that failed in Afghanistan itself.

The British in the 19th century and the Soviets in the 20th century attempted to conquer that wild country by ethnic cleansing and were seen off, though after terrible bloodshed. Imperial cemeteries are their memorials.

People power, sometimes baffling, often heroic, remains the seed beneath the snow, and invaders fear it.

"It was curious," wrote Orwell in 1984, "to think that the sky was the same for everybody, in Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here. And the people under the sky were also very much the same--everywhere, all over the world...

"People ignorant of one another's existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same--people who...were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world."

Obama Further Expands The War on Terror

I wonder how many of the people in this picture voted for Obama...

By Bill Van Auken

Three days after the failed attempt by a 23-year-old Nigerian student to trigger an explosion on a Northwest Airlines passenger jet, President Barack Obama threatened to unleash US military power in Yemen and across the globe.The Obama regime is now threatening to launch offensives in Yemen and Somalia, supposedly to root out terrorism. This only exposes similar justifications for the wars in Afghanistan-Pakistan and Iraq as a fraud against Americans and the world.
Three hundred innocent people nearly lost their lives in Detroit on December 25. If they had, their deaths would have been one more episode of “collateral damage” in a military offensive by US imperialism that has cost the lives of well over a million people over the past eight years in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere.

 These military campaigns have been driven by the interests of US capitalism in asserting dominance over the strategic oil supplies as well the pipelines and shipping routes of the Middle East and Central Asia.

In targeting Yemen and Somalia, Washington is preparing to militarily straddle the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, giving it control of the chokepoint in a key route for shipping oil from the Persian Gulf to the West.

America’s ruling financial elite is pursuing these aims with cold-blooded indifference to the loss of human life that they entail, including among innocent American civilians forced to pay the price for the criminal acts of their government.

Three days after the failed attempt by a 23-year-old Nigerian student to trigger an explosion on a Northwest Airlines passenger jet, President Barack Obama threatened to unleash US military power in Yemen and across the globe.

Obama interrupted his Hawaii vacation Monday to deliver his bellicose remarks in the face of a crescendo of Republican criticism. The Republican right has tried to exploit the abortive attack in order to indict the Democratic administration as “soft” on terrorism.

This campaign has been fueled in part by the claim initially made by Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano that “the system worked” in the incident, which easily could have claimed the lives of 300 passengers and crew members.

In fact, there are serious questions about how the student, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, was able to board the plane.

He reportedly bought a one-way ticket, paid for in cash, and checked no luggage. Moreover, according to an account given by fellow passengers, he and an accomplice had tried to get him on the flight without showing a passport.

On Tuesday, the Associated Press cited unnamed intelligence officials as stating that they had recordings of conversations between Abdulmutallab and at least one member of al Qaeda.

His father had informed the US Embassy in Lagos more than a month earlier that his son had fallen in with Islamist extremists in Yemen, which resulted in his name being placed on a terror watch list.

Any one of these things should have triggered intense scrutiny. That they did not suggests the possibility that Abdulmutallab’s boarding the flight was facilitated from within the national security apparatus.

This allowed him to carry out an action that is now being used to justify yet another US military intervention abroad.

Clearly, the Republicans in Congress have no interest in probing any of these issues. Rather, they are trying to turn the failed bombing into an argument in defense of torture, for keeping open the US prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and to vindicate all of the criminal policies of the Bush administration.

Obama’s response has been an attempt to outflank his Republican critics from the right by threatening another expansion of US militarist aggression.

There can be little doubt that this will be supplemented with intensified attacks on democratic rights and the continuation of the policies of torture and preventive detention.

In his remarks Monday, Obama vowed “to use every element of our national power to disrupt, to dismantle, and defeat the violent extremists who threaten us—whether they are from Afghanistan or Pakistan, Yemen or Somalia, or anywhere where they are plotting attacks against the US homeland.”

The US administration is already in the midst of an escalation that is sending another 30,000 US troops into Afghanistan.

It has mounted an intensified campaign of Predator drone missile attacks against Pakistan, while, according to recent press reports, also sending Special Operations units and CIA operatives into the country to conduct covert assassination and “snatch and grab” missions.

It has justified these acts of military aggression as a necessary defense of the “homeland” against terrorist attacks, the same rationale given by the Bush administration for launching the eight-year-old war in Afghanistan as well as the invasion and occupation of Iraq, now in its seventh year.

Now, the Obama White House is preparing to unleash “every element of our national power” against Yemen and Somalia, and perhaps other nations yet unnamed.

The Pentagon and the CIA are already involved in semi-covert operations in both of these countries.

In Somalia, having organized a proxy invasion by US-assisted Ethiopian troops in 2006, Washington is now channeling arms and other military aid to the Transitional Federal Government (TFG), while carrying out clandestine assassination raids by American commandos operating from US warships.

In Yemen, US warplanes have carried out repeated strikes against purported Al Qaeda targets as well as against Shia rebels known as the Huthis in the country’s northwest.

Washington has cemented increasingly close relations with the repressive dictatorship of Field Marshal Ali Abdullah Saleh, dispatching top officials, including Central Command chief General David Petraeus and Obama’s counterterrorism advisor, John Brennan, to the Yemeni capital of Sana’a.

The December 25 bombing attempt on the Northwest flight may now be used to make the US military interventions in both countries more direct, overt and deadly.

In his remarks Monday, Obama justified these actions as a means of keeping the American public “safe and secure” in the face of what he termed “a serious reminder of the dangers that we face and the nature of those who threaten our homeland.”

The reality is that the military actions being prepared by Washington will have just the opposite effect.

If the statement attributed to the group Al Qaeda of the Arabian Peninsula claiming responsibility is to be believed, the attempted airline bombing was undertaken in retaliation for the December 17 US bombing of Yemen that claimed the lives of more than 60 civilians, nearly half of them women and children.

What does the December 25 incident reveal about “the nature of those who threaten our homeland”?

Abdulmutallab, the son of one of Nigeria’s wealthiest bankers, was apparently radicalized while attending the prestigious University College London.

Like millions of young Muslims, most from far less privileged backgrounds, he undoubtedly was outraged by the images of dead and wounded men, women and children produced by the US invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as by the slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza by Washington’s closest ally and client state, Israel.

That this anger is channeled into the retrograde Islamist politics and reactionary terrorist methods of groups like Al Qaeda is no accident.

These organizations represent in a real sense Washington’s Frankenstein’s monster.

For decades, the CIA promoted Islamist movements ranging from the Muslim Brotherhood to the precursor of Hamas as a means of undermining socialist and left-nationalist movements in the Middle East.

This policy found its most lethal expression in Afghanistan, where Washington spent billions of dollars in financing and arming an Islamist insurgency against the Soviet-backed regime in Kabul.

This triggered a war that devastated the country and killed more than 1 million Afghans. It was in this war, initiated in 1978, that Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda got their start.

Similarly, in Yemen, as part of its Cold War crusade, Washington backed the Islamist regime in the North against secular nationalists in the South who called themselves socialists and forged ties with Moscow.

In the country’s 1994 civil war, Yemenis returning from fighting the Soviet Union in Afghanistan played a prominent role in helping to secure the rule of Saleh.

That the Obama administration is now threatening to launch offensives in Yemen and Somalia, supposedly to root out terrorism, only exposes similar justifications for the wars in Afghanistan-Pakistan and Iraq as a fraud against the people of the United States and the world.

Three hundred innocent people nearly lost their lives in Detroit on December 25. If they had, their deaths would have been one more episode of “collateral damage” in a military offensive by US imperialism that has cost the lives of well over a million people over the past eight years in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere.

These military campaigns have been driven by the interests of US capitalism in asserting dominance over the strategic oil supplies as well the pipelines and shipping routes of the Middle East and Central Asia.

In targeting Yemen and Somalia, Washington is preparing to militarily straddle the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, giving it control of the chokepoint in a key route for shipping oil from the Persian Gulf to the West.

America’s ruling financial elite is pursuing these aims with cold-blooded indifference to the loss of human life that they entail, including among innocent American civilians forced to pay the price for the criminal acts of their government.