A decade of global crimes, crucial advances, Current affairs, NewAgeIslam.com

Current affairs

A decade of global crimes, crucial advances

By Seumas Milne

Dec 31, 2009

U.S. strategic defeat in Iraq, a discredited market model, China’s rise and Latin American freedom offer hope for the world.

Eight years on, we’re still caught in the shadow of the twin towers. As a rule, terrorism in its proper sense isn’t just morally indefensible — it also doesn’t work. In contrast to mass national resistance campaigns or guerrilla movements, the record of socially disconnected terror groups, from the Russian anarchists onwards, has been one of unmitigated failure. But the wildly miscalculated response of the United States government succeeded in turning the 9/11 atrocities into what may rank as the most successful terror attack in history.

It also triggered the first of four decisive changes which have ensured that the 21st century’s first decade has transformed the world — in some significant ways for the better. Osama Bin Laden’s initial demand was the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Saudi Arabia, which was carried out in short order. But it was George Bush’s war on terror that paradoxically delivered the greatest blow to U.S. authority and the world’s first truly global empire, in ways Al Qaeda could scarcely have dreamed of.

Not only did the lawless savagery of the U.S. campaign of killings, torture, kidnappings and incarceration without trial spawn terrorists across the Muslim world and beyond, while comprehensively disposing of western pretensions to be the global guardians of human rights. But the U.S.-British invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, in the latter case on a flagrantly false pretext, starkly exposed the limits of U.S. military power to impose its will on recalcitrant peoples prepared to fight back.

http://newageislam.com/a-decade-of-global-crimes,-crucial-advances/current-affairs/d/2320

How to create terrorists: The U.K. government’s recipe, War on Terror, NewAgeIslam.com

War on Terror

How to create terrorists: The U.K. government’s recipe

By Seumas Milne

I never imagined I would say this, but Stella Rimington is right. The former head of the British Security Service — MI5 — who made her career running her department’s dirtiest operations in the 1980s, against the U.K.’s miners’ union and the IRA, has warned that Gordon Brown’s government has given terrorists the chance to find “greater justification” by making people feel they “live in fear and under a police state.” Naturally, ministers described her remarks as nonsense and accused her of playing “into the hands of our enemies.”

But the damage is done. To have the woman once hailed as Britain’s Queen of Spies accusing the U.K. government of recklessly counter-productive authoritarianism carries a special weight — and incidentally turns the traditional relationship between Labour and the secret state on its head. Rimington went further, denouncing the U.S. for Guantanamo and torture, but reverted to type by insisting MI5 “doesn’t do that.”

No, as we now know, it contracts out that job to others, while its officers stand by promising to arrange “more lenient treatment” if the victim cooperates. In case after case, British collaboration in the hidden crimes of the war on terror has now been laid bare. But none more so than in the seven-year ordeal of Binyam Mohamed, the last British resident in Guantanamo, the details of whose CIA kidnapping and U.S.-orchestrated torture across four countries the U.K. Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, has twisted and turned to prevent being made public.

http://newageislam.com/how-to-create-terrorists--the-u.k.-government%E2%80%99s-recipe--/war-on-terror/d/1205