From Global Voices Online:

Blogger Khalid Jarrar, author of Secrets in Baghdad, remains in custody of the Iraqi intelligence service, known as the Mukhabarat.

As we reported yesterday, Khalid’s brother Raed says their family was relieved to hear on Thursday morning that Khalid is still alive after going missing for two days. On Sunday, Khalid described on his blog how his apartment in Baghdad had been broken into and his hard drive was stolen. Soon after that he disappeared…

Having read a few of Khalid’s blog entries there is nothing in them to suggest that he is anything more than an ordinary Iraqi who’s a bit pissed off with seeing his country shot to shit under US occupation and if the US and the fledgling Iraqi government want to convince us that everything will turn out for the best then the very least they can do is apply habeas corpus.

You can read Khalid’s blog for yourself here - Secrets In Baghdad

I’m kidding, right? Wrong…

…because that would be the effect of introducing a new criminal offence of providing or receiving terrorist training, which the Beeb suggests is being considered by the government.

Let’s just take a brief look at few excerpts from the CIA’s ‘rap sheet’ when it comes supporting terrorism, insurgency, military coups and, of course, propping up right-wing dictators around the world.

Iran (1953) - Orchestrated the overthrow of democratically elected Mossadegh and restored the Shah to power.

Guatemala (1954) - Supported a military coup which overthrew the democratically elected Jacobo Arbenz Guzman and placed Colonel Armas in power.

Cuba (1961) - Directed the Bay of Pigs invasions but failed to overthrow the Castro government.

Indonesia (1965-67) - Implicated in events leading to the installation of Suharto as President.

Chile (1973) - Orchestrated a coup, killing President Allende who had been popularly elected. Helped to establish a military regime under General Pinochet.

Angola (1976-92) - Backed South African rebels fighting against Marxist Angola.

Afghanistan (1979-1988) - Supported/trained Afghan Mujahideen - amongst the groups who received training were the Taliban and Al-Qaeda

El Salvador (1981-92) - The CIA plus US troops and advisers aid in El Salvador’s war against the FMLN.

During this period the Human Rights Commission of El Salvador published a 165-page report on the Mariona men’s prison which documented the routine use of at least 40 kinds of torture on political prisoners, and that U.S. servicemen often acted as supervisors.

Nicaragua (1981-90) - The CIA and NSC directed the Contra War against the Sandinistas.

The fact is that when it comes to training terrorists and insurgents, the US, and particularly the CIA, has a track record second to none.

Luckily for our allies from across the pond, this new legislation would no include retrospective powers, so any CIA operatives and US ’spacial advisors’ who were involved is, say, the training of Al-Qaeda members in insurgency techniques back in the 1980’s will be completely in the clear.

‘In such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, not to be on the side of the executioners.’
Albert Camus

No prizes for guessing the hot topic of the week – yeah, terrorism.

And if ever you needed proof of the adage that ‘opinions are like assholes – everyone’s got one’* you need look no further than the blogosphere over the last week.

*Note – a quick google shows the line ‘opinions are like assholes…’ has been attributed to a variety of sources, from Art Blakey, through golfer Arnold Palmer to Clint Eastwood [in ‘Dirty Harry’] which suggests that its likely to be one of those ‘folk’ sayings best attributed to Anon.

So much has been written on the subject over the last week that its difficult not to find yourself going over ground that’s already been well an truly raked over by everyone else. There have been a few ’stand out’ pieces of commentary which I’ll link to at the end of this piece but otherwise the general tone has been very much along the lines of:

‘What about those bombings in London… [insert your per theory here]’

I suppose, on a human level, this is entirely understandable. Natural even. When faced with atrocity, whether its a terrorist attack or something slightly more prosaic like a particularly heinous murder, its only natural that people will cast around trying to make sense of things, trying to find an explanation which fits with their personal weltanschauug – the very idea that there may not be a rational explanation being too nihilistic for most people’s comfort, making the search for meaning a necessity.

The search for meaning is, however, not necessarily a search for understanding of what may motivated four young British Muslims to carry out a suicide attack on London but a means of differentiation. People look for meaning in atrocity only inasmuch as any meaning that they may be able to identify enables them to eject the act, its perpetrators and their motives from their own world view, a way to place such events into the context of ‘us and not-us’. On a psychological and sociological level the question of ‘how could this happen?’ is far less important that the question of ‘how are those responsible different from us?’ - to fail to address the latter question being a source of deep discomfort as it forces us to confront out own capacity for atrocity rather than place those responsible safely on the outside of our existence and into the safe realm of ‘not-us’.

Hence we run through the usual process of attributing to the event, and those responsible for it, a range of qualities which mark them out as being different.

Those of a religious bent will fall back on the concept of ‘evil’ meaning that which has the quality of being inimical towards everything that is ‘good’ – whatever ‘good’ might be from their perspective - and if the assailant does something so inconvenient as to claim to be motivated by their religious beliefs? Well then they either follow the ‘wrong religion’, or they interpret the ‘right’ religion in the wrong way, or they are ‘politically motivated’ and so aren’t really religious at all. Not really.

If religion is not really your ‘thing’ then perhaps psychology might offer a little personal comfort – ‘They’re not evil, they’re ill. Its all the work of psychopaths/sociopaths/whatever…’

And if that fails, try simple xenophobia – ‘Its all these blaaady foreigners, innit. Never should ‘ave let ‘em in the country in the first place…’ - never, ever, underestimate the power of ignorance in difficult times.

And, of course there’s ‘fanaticism’ and ‘extremism’ – both handy utilitarian terms which can be applied to pretty much any particular interpretation you want to throw into the ring for consideration with equal effect.

Alternatively it could be a matter of ‘ideology’ – the ‘wrong’ ideology, an ‘extreme’ ideology or, playing mix and match, now, an ‘evil’ ideology… no doubt in BNP circles the talk will be of an ‘evil foreign ideology’ just to compound things even further.

Whatever understanding one arrives at, the purpose of seeking that understanding is same. It is a means to disavow those responsible, to separate them out of the wider mass of humanity and, in order to preserve our own personal sense of well-being, mark them as being ‘not like us’.

Only they are like us, in fact they are us – all of us.

What drove these young British men to become suicide bombers is what as always driven young men - and women - to espouse, follow and sometimes die in the name of their own chosen cause. This is not an unusual phenomenon, nor does it, as the Observer blog suggests, silence the imagination. Strip away the theories, theology and ideology and what we are left with is the age old mix of youth and/or idealism/alienation which has driven people to such acts throughout the course of human history.

In terms of the mindset there is little intrinsic difference between those four young men and the young men who decamped to Spain in the 1930’s to fight in the Spanish Civil war…

Or the many thousands of young men who took the “King’s Shillingâ€? between 1914 and 1918 and were left lying in mud and squalor of the battlefields of the Somme and of Ypres…

Or that of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, two young men who, on April 20th 1999, walked calmly into Columbine High School and shot dead a teacher and twelve of their fellow students…

Even the Women’s Suffrage movement spawned it’s very own martyr, Emily Davison who died having stepped out in front of the King’s horse during the 1913 Epsom Derby.

There is nothing unusual in young people dying for a cause they profess to believe in, nor indeed in finding the causes that society has to offer so unmoving that they descend into alienation and nihilism, into self-harm, suicide and sometimes murder – both are facets of human nature which are open to exploitation.

Nor is it there anything unusual in finding that there are those who are willing to exploit this facet of human nature to their own ends – the young have always made for the best foot soldiers and followers in any movement whether it that movement is driven by religion, ideology, nationalism or, more rarely by compassion and a sense of injustice.

The current campaign to ‘Make Poverty History’ is no less dependent for its support on the beliefs and ideals of its supporters than is Al-Qaeda on theirs and such differences as exist between to the two are very much in the eye of the beholder. The difference between a terrorist and a freedom-fighter, between a martyr and a murderer is a matter of perspective, distinguishable only when, as observers, we make a moral judgement about whether believe a particular cause to be right or wrong. There are no moral absolutes here, much as we might to wish to believe there are. How can their be after Dresden and Guernica? After Hiroshima and Srebrenica. After Nánjīng and Rwanda. No society, no country, no culture, no religion can claim absolute innocence – did Samson give a moment’s thought to ‘thou shalt not kill’ before laying into the Philistines with an asses jawbone?

Without moral certainty we are left only with the judgement of our times, and eventually of history, but history, of course, is written by the winning side and with victory comes moral justification and trite aphorisms – ‘the end justifies the means’, ‘ the needs of the many…’ and ‘we were only following orders’.

We only have to look at our own present leaders to see this in action.

We were told, before the invasion, that Iraq presented a clear and present threat, that they had ‘weapons of mass destruction’ and that these could be ‘deployed’ in a mere forty-five minutes – none of it was true.

No we’re told that none of that matters, that we were justified in removing an ‘evil dictator’ because it was for the benefit of the Iraqi people – anyone remember Bush, Blair or anyone else speaking at length about their concern for the Iraqi people before the plan started to go pear-shaped and it became apparent that the UN weapons inspectors we going to turn up nothing which would justify going to war?

The Iraqi people, so we’re told, are better of without Saddam and the Ba’athist regime, they have – or rather will have – all the benefits and freedoms that democracy provides. And, who knows, maybe they will be in the long run. Maybe when history comes to judge the invasion of Iraq, many years from now, its judgement will be that we did the right thing, that the Iraqi people really will be better off…

… as soon as they can get past the fact that the invasion turned the place into a terrorist’s playground.

Hey, but what’s another Lebanon between newly found ‘friends’.

None of this, however, makes Iraq, Afghanistan or even the on-going situation in Israel/Palestine the reason why these young men chose to carry out a suicide attack on our capital city, as some have suggested. They are a reason – one of many – and would certainly feature highly on Al Qaeda’s list of ‘motivational speeches for the recruits’. Social conditions in West Yorkshire will also, almost certainly, have played their part in ‘preparing the ground’ for the handler who recruited these young men to his ’cause’ – 20% unemployment amongst young Muslim men and the pig ignorant racism of BNP on your doorstep are just what’s needed if you’re looking to feed the alienated youth, your ‘target’ audience, with dreams of eternal paradise and a sizeable supply of willing virgins, and in return for ‘just carrying this rucksack full of explosives’.

However even this is insufficient to explain fully why these young men chose ’suicide bomber’ as a career choice despite the lousy prospects for advancement the position tends to offer.

Why did these four young men carry the bombs which took their own lives and those of their fellow citizens?

You might just as well ask why people join the Labour Party or the Armed Forces or the Church of Scientology’ or the Women’s Institute – there is no simple, single, absolute reason other than that in their chosen ’cause’ they found something in which they could believe.

Ultimately, they acted as they did because they were young, idealistic and pissed off – which makes them no different to many other young people here, and across the globe – and that’s what really ’silences the imagination’,

When we think of these four young men, if we really think about them without taking the easy way out and simply writing them off as ‘not-us’, then we’re forced to recognise that whatever it was that made them a terrorist and not a lawyer or a doctor, a shopkeeper or bus driver, a husband and/or a father, is there inside us all, lying dormant and waiting for the right opportunity, the right situation – the right’ cause’…

…the one which lifts the moral restraints.

And that, sad to say, is both a simple and a complex as human nature at work.

You know — we’ve had to imagine the war here, and we have imagined that it was being fought by aging men like ourselves. We had forgotten that the wars were fought by babies. When I saw those freashly shaved faces, it was a shock. ‘My God, my God —’ I said to myself, ‘it’s the Children’s Crusade.’
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

—-

As for other commentary’s worth reading, I’d recommend a few of these…

Phil at Actually Existing on responding to terror - also at The Sharpener

Blood & Treasure with a take on confronting extremism which falls somewhere between Kafka and Bill Gates.

John Nichols from The Capital Times on how we pissed off the ‘hawks’ over in the US by not getting in a flap and demanding revenge at all costs - look guys, there’s no great secret here, you just drink the fucking tea not dump in the harbour…

Small Town Scribbles - just read…

Scott at the Daily Ablution sets the world to rights with the help of a few Indy readers…

And last, but by no means least, the Militant Pine Martin invokes the sad spectre of Pyrrhus and Charles the Safety Elephant in the same post