Political Uses Of The Boston Marathon Bombing

[I use the singular, bombing, to denote a single incident. Two bombs were set off seconds apart, in relatively close proximity.]

This latest “terrorist” bombing has in many ways been a godsend for the U.S. establishment. (The term terrorist is so politicized at this point that one is almost compelled to put it in quotation marks, yet to do so immediately subjects one to attack for “apologizing for” or “justifying” terrorism- whatever “terrorism” is- or at the least for being insufficiently appalled, grief-stricken, shocked, horrified by the particular bombing or attempted bombing.) [1]

Most obviously, it provides an opportunity to administer a booster shot of War On Terror indoctrination to the public. As “9/11” recedes in time, and the effects of the massive propaganda campaign that was launched around that one-day event wanes, reinforcement of the indoctrination is necessary.

Notice that “9/11” is used as a totem. All they have to do to press people's buttons is say “9/11.” All the hours and hours of pictures of the burning Twin Towers are permanently embedded in people's minds now on a deep level, as “a horror.” Every invocation of “9/11” causes a mental vibration, an emotional harmonic to occur. It “strikes a chord.” Over and over, the media strums that same note. [2]

I think it no accident that the year is omitted from the date, 9/11. How different to say, 9/11/01, as I do. Now you see how old it is, how long ago it was. Putting it in the past makes it part of history, an event that once occurred, not an ever-present, timeless reality hovering over your shoulder like a malevolent god, a bad dream that never ends or a recurring nightmare stirred up every time some nasty fanatics set off a bomb inside U.S. territorial borders or tries to blow up his underwear or shoes on a plane.

The propaganda system doesn't want people to get over it. They want to keep people in a permanent state of anxiety and fear. (Contrary to what they say, such as Obama saying after the Marathon bombing that “we” will not be frightened. In fact they want people to be frightened, or they WOULDN'T HARP ON IT SO MUCH. I guess politicians lie- who knew?)

Keeping people anxious and fearful makes them submissive to “authority” (the people in power). It makes people feel dependent on those in power for protection and security. (Not for nothing is the word “security” bandied about constantly, in dishonest ways, when they're really talking about the power of the people in power, as in “security services,” or “national security.” This is true in other countries too of course.) It makes people accept living in a police state, submit to paying for a gigantic military establishment and constant wars. I.e. life in an Imperialist state.

The timing of the Marathon bombing was also very fortuitous for the establishment, as two other events occurred around the same time that they wouldn't want too much attention focused on. First, a private group called the Constitution Project came out with a report that finally called U.S. torture, torture. Furthermore, it blamed the top officials of the U.S. for it. (That would be Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, etc.) The 11-person panel that produced the report was co-chaired by Asa Hutchinson, of all people, a former GOP Congressman and deputy Secretary of Bush's Department of Homeland Security. It did make the front page of the NY Times on April 16th, the day after the bombing, on the bottom. (The bombing took up more than the top half of the front page, including a large photo of the bloody scene.) The second to last paragraph of the article lets drop that the report contains dozens of cases of the U.S. prosecuting similar treatment or denouncing others for doing the same things. That is, it exposes utter U.S. hypocrisy. The report also confirms that the CIA is lying through its teeth when it claims it only ever water-boarded three people. (Which in the article the NY Times still falsely calls “near-drowning,” as if you have to die to be drowned. Drowning means getting water in your lungs, which is what water-boarding does.)

Later that week, a fertilizer plant in the town of West, Texas, blew up, killing 14 firemen and injuring 200 residents. The significance of that: first, notice that almost five times as many people were killed by that explosion as by the bombs in Boston, which killed 3, and more were wounded than the 170 in Boston. But that was “just an accident,” so not worthy of week after week of wall-to-wall obsessing over.

Was it an accident? More like an accident waiting to happen. That is, when one examines the details (which I won't go into here but you can easily find information about it) one discovers that it's that old U.S. story of a paper-thin facade of regulation, reckless practices, wrist-slap penalties, and a dominate ideology that insists that regulation of business is BAD. This noxious ideology is especially powerful in Texas. And this explosion will change nothing. Just watch. Because this has happened before. In fact it happens often. 

In 2005 there was another major explosion in Texas, in a BP (remember them) refinery. That "accident" killed 15 workers (5 times the death toll in Boston last week) and injured 170. BP chronically refuses to follow reasonable safety procedures, and after every "accident" it promises regulators to reform itself and shape up, and then proceeds to violate its promises. In Texas, in Alaska, everywhere. Every single time.

I know nothing will change because the U.S. is in the iron grip of an anti-human ideology that elevates private profit over all other values, including human life. The other way I know this is from history: for example the Texas City explosion of 1947 that killed at least 581 people, including all but one member of the local fire department. Thousands were injured. At least 1,000 homes and other buildings were damaged or destroyed. Like the latest disaster, this explosion started with a fire. 

Yet look where we are today. Toothless regulators on the Federal level (OSHA) and regulation-hating “regulators” on the state level in Texas and most other states. Both are feckless and ineffective. The West, Texas plant, situation in a populated area and near a school (they don't even care about children) was effectively unregulated, subject to a mere facade of oversight. As the phenomenon of Ronald Reagan proved, ideology is more powerful than reality. (Religion proves this too, even more starkly. How can people believe that absurd stuff?)

In fact, things will get worse. The NY Times has just reported that the evil Koch brothers are scheming to buy the newspapers of the Tribune Company, which include the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune, the better to foist their noxious anti-regulation ideology on the public. (As if those rags were ever pro-regulation.) These papers have long been the propaganda tools of rich reactionary families- the Chandlers in L.A., and the McCormicks in Chicago. Tribune Company bought the Times from the Chandlers, and then the crude and vulgar philistine real estate hustler Sam Zell seized control of Tribune Company with a leveraged buyout, gutted the newsrooms, and bankrupted the company. [3]

1) Yes, even attempted bombings are supposed to elicit shock and horror and terror, no matter how ludicrous- the sad sack “underwear bomber,” the moronic “shoe bomber” (Richard Reid), both lame attempts to bring down passenger planes, or the inept Pakistani whose defective car bomb made some smoke and fizzled in Times Square, or the various “plots,” some fabricated by the FBI. All these trivial things the media won't stop reminding us of. (Yes, trivial It's not as if people are being blown apart weekly, as in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Nigeria, for example, or less often in Indonesia, or India, or in the Gaza Strip, in many of these cases by U.S. munitions. The U.S. media apparently is in the threat-exaggeration business, to justify the relentless increase in domestic repression and global aggression. There is a threat- there are always threats, that's just life- but there are reasonable responses and uses of force to deal with it. What the U.S. ruling system is doing is deliberately portraying itself- and us- as being in mortal peril to justify its own crimes and human rights depredations and flat-out terrorism.)

At exactly the same time that the U.S. media was in a hysterical tizzy over the “terrorist” bombing in Boston, political bombings in Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan were described in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, to take examples from the apex of the U.S. propaganda system, as being the work of “militants.” It is standard practice to describe bombings aimed at civilians in those places as committed by “militants,” never “terrorists.”

Unless the victims are “white.” So bombings by jihadists in Indonesia are done by “militants,” except that the Bali bombing that killed 200 mostly Australian tourists is a “terrorist” bombing.

And of course, the U.S.' own bombings can never be “terrorist.” Right now, a young Yemeni man* who went to high school in the U.S. and, ironically, was mentored by a USAF officer, just testified before Congress about a recent U.S. strike on a Yemeni village that slaughtered people, blowing them apart, literally into bits of flesh, with cluster bombs far more devilishly murderous than the crude bombs the Boston Marathon “terrorist” bombers constructed out of pressure cookers, black powder, nails and ball bearings. The “target” was a known man, not in hiding, who the Yemeni government could have easily arrested. But the U.S. under Obama is apparently in a take-no-prisoners mode, so poor villagers must be randomly slaughtered and live in terror, in Yemen, in Pakistan, in Somalia, in god knows where else. Because the U.S. is “fighting terrorism,” don't you see? So how fortunate that its obsession with the Boston Marathon bombing gives the U.S. media a convenient excuse to ignore this, and a distraction for the public.

The U.S. doesn't even bother using the words consistently, let alone logically. Nor does it follow its own official definitions. The U.S. government and media uses the words when it wants to whip up hatred and outrage towards a political target or, and justify a war, or aggression, or “suspension” of civil liberties, or get away with gross human rights violations, or draconian punishment.

Terrorist, like Communist, is a political curse word,.That's all it is when they use it. And terrorism and communism are ill- or never-defined terms that are understood and used as synonyms for Pure Evil.

So using the words “terrorism” and “terrorist” in the way the U.S. establishment uses them is to play Simon Says, with them as Simon and us as copycats.

The same with “terrorist states.” Cuba is a “terrorist state.” Says who? Says the U.S. The U.S. puts nations on its “state sponsor of terrorism” list as a political punishment, NOT because of any actual actions by the targeted state.

Of course, one nation that will never be on that list is a nation that actually has created terror in the hearts and minds of millions of people around the world, for many decades. A nation that mercilessly bombed and slaughtered millions of people in Indochina not too long ago. A nation that has overthrow governments around the world, and installed fascist dictatorships in their places (which killed hundreds of thousands of people in two cases- Iran and Guatemala- and killed almost a million in Indonesia in a political holocaust instigated and orchestrated by the instigating nation's global secret police); a nation that assassinates routinely, with impunity, in several nations at once, spreading chronic fear among impoverished villagers who live under killer drones; the world's greatest sponsor of state terrorism,the good ole self-righteous U.S. of A.

*Farea al-Muslimi was the Yemeni who testified on April 23 before a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee convened to examine the drone war. The Obama regime didn't send a representative to testify. [See “As Obama Shuns Hearing, Yemeni Says U.S. Drone War Terrifying Civilians, Empowering Militants," at democracynow.org.]

2) To me, the attacks that day were not a horror, but a disaster, a man-made one, and a tragedy for those who lost loved ones or suffered injuries or disease. As are many things. The idea that it was unique, or unusually awful, is simply counter-factual. More people die in earthquakes and tsunamis all the time. And all but the smallest wars kill more people. And Bashar Assad is doing the same thing on a smaller scale daily in Syria, bombing and shelling buildings with people in them. Every time Israel launches one of its wars on Gaza, again, same thing, only smaller buildings and fewer casualties. What difference does calling one thing “terrorism” and calling other attacks on populated buildings something else make? Dead is dead.

3) A so-called leveraged buyout is a form of theft. It's like a virus invading a bacteria or cell and hijacking the cell, turning it into its slave. In a leverage buyout, the thief doesn't buy the company with his own money. Instead he “buys” it by using the assets of the victim company- which he doesn't yet own- as collateral to borrow the “purchase” money, generally from an “investment bank,” heaping the resulting debt on the company he's “buying.” In other words, in effect the invader forces the company to buy itself and hand itself over to the invader. Mitt “Robber Baron” Romney used this invading-virus technique to make fortunes at Bain Capital, gutting workers' benefits and robbing them of their pensions and often their jobs in the process. In some cases, the companies were completely destroyed.

News From Nothing

CNN and Fox “News” (the creations of, respectively, media monopolists Ted Turner, and Rupert Murdoch assisted by GOP Media Mephistopheles Roger Ailes) spent an hour April 17^th bloviating with their “correspondents” and various attention-hungry “experts” about the arrest of a suspect in the Boston Marathon bombing.

Too bad there was no such arrest and the suspect didn't exist.

It's gotten to the point with media misinformation on the case that the FBI has chided their long-time allies, the media, about their feckless “journalism,” (my quotes), instructing “the media” “to exercise caution and attempt to verify information through appropriate official channels before reporting.”

For the past few days there have been repeated false reports in the “mainstream” (i.e. big corporate) media of suspects under guard in hospital, of arrests, even of five unexploded bombs, that were apparently totally baseless.

(Are elements within the police establishment deliberately burning these hacks? Or are dumb cops spreading rumors among themselves which then get passed along to the hacks?)

CNN “broke the [entirely false] news” of an arrest at 1:45 pm Wednesday. Their “reporter,” John King, was no doubt thrilled to be first with his “scoop,” which he claimed came to him from “a law enforcement source,” as they say. Half an hour earlier, he performed some foreplay on his audience, breathlessly announcing a “breakthrough in the identification of a suspect,” “a dark-skinned male.” [Was he wearing a turban too, John?] King claimed to have multiple “law-enforcement sources.”

Murdoch's fascist agitprop rag, the New York Post, one of the world's worst “news”papers, falsely reported a Saudi man in custody in the bombing.

The AP also falsely reported along the same lines. Boston local television stations ran false arrest or suspect- in-custody stories the same day, citing “law enforcement sources.”

The fact that first King reported a “breakthrough” in identifying a “suspect,” “a dark-skinned male,” and half an hour later, an arrest, indicates he was being fed a stream of disinformation.

CNN claims it had three “credible sources” for the false arrest story.

Fox anchor Megyn Kelly tried to squirm out of the contretemps with this tortured statement: “It appears in this case some confirmations were issued when perhaps they should not have been.”

Yeah, perhaps. Perhaps your “law enforcement sources” shouldn't have burned you by “confirming” false information. Or disinformation, as they say in the secret police trade.

What are we to make of CNN's and Fox's claims of multiple police sources, including apparently FBI ones? Doesn't sound like one ill-informed flatfoot passing along a bum tip.

Whoever police and/or FBI agents are putting out this stuff, they are quite busy. We're talking multiple major media repeatedly reporting misinformation about unexploded bombs, Saudi suspects, arrests, swarthy perpetrators in custody. 

How should we interpret this? Are anti-Muslim police feeding disinformation to the media?

The FBI and police have repeatedly been caught using anti-Muslim “anti-terrorist training material” to indoctrinate their personnel. No doubt it had its intended effect on some of the trainees, making them zealots.

A more sinister possibility: extremist elements or moles within the police establishment are putting out red herrings to protect white racist/fascist bombers such as Timothy McVeigh and Eric Robert Rudolph types. (The innocent security guard Richard Jewell came within a hair's breadth of taking the rap for Rudolph's bombing of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, when the FBI tried to frame him up, using the media to preemptively convict him in the public's mind, after luring him to their lair and tricking him into playacting a “confession,” using the ruse of telling him it was an anti-terrorist exercise. Jewell's lawyer interceded in the nick of time.)

These aren't “conspiracy theories.” I have no theory to explain why people inside the police establishment are planting information they surely know is false in the media. Who is doing this and why should be investigated- but won't be. All I have raised are possibilities.

Sometimes alibi-makers for the corporate oligarchy's media make the excuse that “competitive pressures to be first with news” make their media sloppy. They mean well, you see, they can't help it, it's not their fault, they're under external pressure. And there's something to that- but not much.

When over and over they run with whatever their state security “sources” tell them, when these sources have proven over the years that they are unethical, manipulative, self-serving, and have a record of planting disinformation in the media, we cannot accept that the media people are naïve naifs being taken in.

Basically the corporate propaganda system is constantly manipulating the public. Its business is the manipulation of mass consciousness. So often it reports misinformation and disinformation and government propaganda planted with it. There have been entire campaigns of lies promulgated by the establishment's propaganda system for political ends. A few examples are the Tonkin Gulf incident, “Yellow Rain,” the “Pope Plot” (a Turkish fascist member of the Grey Wolves shot a Pope, and the CIA and U.S. media- and foreign media accomplices of the CIA- twisted that into an imaginary Bulgarian-KGB plot), Iraq's Al-Qaeda ties and “weapons of mass destruction.” We could go farther back in time for examples of U.S. media propaganda serving hidden political ends. Hearst instigating the Spanish-American war (the U.S. stealing the colonies of an enervated older empire), the Zimmerman telegram hoax, and many others.

Within a week after Pinochet assassinated Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt with a bomb made and placed by a Chilean secret police agent, Michael Vernon Townley, Newsweek carried a CIA-planted item, citing the CIA as the source, saying that Pinochet's secret police (DINA) didn't do it. (Of course they had done it- with CIA help, as a matter of fact. The director of the CIA at the time? One George H.W. Bush, later VP and President of the U.S.) Newsweek apparently thought it good as gold that the CIA could know for a fact, just days after the bombing, that the obvious culprits, the ones who had already assassinated numerous people in Latin America and Europe, didn't do it. How the CIA could possibly "know" this, within days of the assassination, apparently didn't pique Newsweek's curiosity. Of course, Newsweek was as much an accomplice in the destruction of democracy and the installation of a murderous fascist military dictatorship as the CIA was. The "liberal" U.S. media hailed the coup. For years afterwards the NY Times ran pro-Pinochet propaganda by a creature named Shirley Christian (a big defender of Anastasio Somoza, dictator of Nicaragua) as well as editorially hailing the coup.

Here's an even better one, if less grotesque and sinister. Another so-called “news” magazine, the chauvinistically named U.S. News and World Report, once ran a photo I saw of a “Soviet spy buoy” that supposedly washed up on a beach, surrounding by a boy scout troop that allegedly happened upon it. Just to make sure there was no doubt, the letters “U.S.S.R.” were helpfully imprinted on the buoy. Perhaps the Soviets did this in case their secret spy buoy got lost, so people would know who to return it to. But even though the Russian initials for their nation are C.C.C.P., they put the English version on, thinking I suppose that more people would know where it came from in that case. You know, the way the U.S. doesn't paint “USAF” on its planes, but paints foreign initials instead.

Absurd. And U.S. Puke and World Distort is not put out by children, so obviously they did this as part of a little secret police disinformation plot.

There's hundreds of thousands of additional examples that could be cited.

So “the” media is in the habit of having contempt for facts. It cares about effect, not accuracy. Sure, it is competitive to a degree- but if it's so competitive, why do all its separate entities toe the same line so often? Why in fact does it suppress accurate information, as it did in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq? Recall that MSNBC canceled its highest rated program, the Phil Donahue show, before the invasion because he was dissenting from the beat-the-war-drums “consensus” of the media.

Here We Go Again!

Another ride on the Terrorism roller coaster.

The media just couldn't pass up an opportunity to inject us with a booster shot of War On Terrorism emotionalism. Now there they go again.

I'm going to put the bombing of the Boston Marathon Monday (April 15^th) in perspective- something sorely lacking in the media frenzy. But first I must say this.

I hope the perpetrators are correctly identified, arrested, tried- and executed.

I think such a vicious act is worthy of death.

So now, let no one misconstrue- either accidentally or deliberately- what follows to be a apologia for, excuse for, justification for, or defense of the bombing or the bombers. I'm not “on the terrorists' side.”

Although they were not immediately branded terrorists. Apparently what makes a bombing a “terrorist” bombing doesn't depend on the target, but on the motive and/or perpetrator. There was much hanging on Obama's words and note was taken that he didn't use the “T” word on the day of the bombing. Immediately after his speechlet, a White House flunkie ran out to the media- which didn't identify him- and told them that of course the bombing was “terrorism.” And the police at first hesitated, saying they wanted to figure out the motive first. So “terrorism” is as much a thought crime as a crime of violence, it would seem. (Of course the branding of various dissident activists as “terrorists” also proves it can be entirely a thought crime.)

The next day, Obama presented himself to us again, to intone the T word four times, apparently to make up for his earlier omission. (Man, that's decisive.) He instructed us that anytime bombers deliberately target civilians, it is “terrorism.” (Unless of course it's U.S. bombers, or Israeli ones- as when they bomb Palestinian refugee camps, including UN-run ones.)

But whether the bombs were “terrorist” bombs or just plain old bombs, the harm was exactly the same. Bombs aren't “worse”- except in people's minds- if they are “terrorist” bombs.  

That last statement is completely at odds with the atttitude and ideology of the power structure in America- government and media.

The two bombs, planted near the finish line, were filled with nails and ball bearings and metal scrap, to maim. Homemade cluster bombs, you might say. Nasty. And those who planted them- intending to kill and mutilate people they don't even know- should be put to death. There is no reason to let them live among us, since they have no respect for our right to live.

They may have in their minds been striking a blow against “America.” In reality, they struck about 173 people they don't even know.

I hope “China” was on their hit list too, because one of the three dead was a Chinese grad student.

Still, the media is blowing this out of all proportion. Three people are dead, over 170 injured, and a number of people were maimed, over a dozen losing legs. That's awful, for them, and for those who love them. But for the rest of us it is merely vicariously awful, and the media should stop pretending otherwise. This is not a national catastrophe. It is a crime.

Even the media, every time something like this happens, has some commentators saying that “attention is exactly what the terrorists want.” So it would logically follow that if the terrorists are your enemies, you don't want to give them what they want, right? You don't want them to achieve their goal. You don't want them to succeed.

So I guess the media is on the terrorists' side. They must be, by their own logic.

No, not quite. Because they have their own agenda, the agenda of the ruling class, which wants people to accept more and more domestic repression, a more and more pervasive secret police state.

Either that, or they really are on the terrorists' side, because what they are doing is giving them what they want, playing into their hands. It inflates their importance. And it inspires others to join their “cause.”

But obviously, as George Orwell so incisively showed in 1984, repressive states thrive on external enemies, real, imagined, or inflated. And they already deliberately allowed the original 9/11/01 attacks to occurs. (That's a subject for another essay.)

As for the marathon attack; as I said, it's awful for the victims. The rest of us should be disgusted, and contemptuous of the lowlifes who perpetrated it.

But not shocked. Is not violence part of the human condition? Is violence unusual? Ever hear of war? Millions die in wars. As wars go, the “war on terror” is small potatoes.

Nor should we be frightened. Or anxious.

If you're frightened, how come it never occurred to you before that you are mortal? Don't you know that YOU ARE GOING TO DIE, someday, inevitably?

Get used to it.

The three killed are far less than die in bad airliner crashes.

Three dead is the exact same number who died the same day in Brooklyn, NY, when a policewoman shot her boyfriend dead, shot her one year old son, and killed herself. By all accounts there was no acrimony between them and she loved her son.

Death is death.

Three is fewer than the 300 people who die every year in bathtubs in the U.S. A hundred times fewer.

The point isn't to minimize the crime, or the pain and suffering for those impacted.

It is to put it in reasonable perspective, instead of inflating the important of the act, which is no doubt what the perpetrators hoped for by bombing this highly visible, public event.

I don't see how going along with their plan is helpful. Unless of course it suits the covert ideological and political goals of the U.S. power structure.

There were some bombings the day before the ones in Boston- in Mogadishu, Somalia. The perpetrators are known, because they proudly announced themselves- the al-Shabab Islamic fanatics. (There victims were Muslim too, of course.) Thirty people died in those attacks- ten times the number as died in Boston.

Didn't notice a big stink in the U.S. media about it. (Much foreign media has copied U.S. media, inflating the importance of the Boston bombings with exaggerated coverage- including the BBC and Aljazeera.)

And on Monday. the same day as the marathon bombings, over 20 attacks in Iraq killed about 50 people and wounded almost 200.

Media people, and probably most Americans, will piously tell you that they don't think one human life is worth more than another- for example, that a Somali life or an Iraqi is less valuable than an American one.

Bullshit. That's obviously not their actual attitude.

And the perpetrators of the bombings and shooting in Somalia and Iraq are not “terrorists” in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, but “militants,” insurgents, “gunmen.” Those are the words they used. They didn't say “terrorism” or “terrorist” once.

Why is that? Is “terrorism” only attacks on Westerners?

Apparently so.

Of course, most people everywhere are parochial in their sympathy like that, to some degree. And Americans are fond of deluding themselves that they're an extraordinarily generous people- contrary to the facts of the matter, that U.S. foreign aid- not military aid- is tiny as a percentage of the Federal budget, and a much smaller percentage than that of many other nations. And domestically, the U.S. has always been stingy towards the poor, and now Social Security and other social spending programs are under assault, so rich people can pay less and less tax.

But again, it's not as if the U.S. isn't involved in Somalia. It's a major front in the “war on terror.” The CIA runs a prison there, for example, and the U.S. conducts military operations to prop up the Potemkin Village “government” that it installed. (A government in name only that makes the Karzai crowd in Afghanistan look like a model of stability.) And al-Shabab, the boasting perpetrators of the Somali attacks who took credit for the assault on the High Court in Mogadishu, are on the U.S. “terrorist” list.

A proper balance would be more attention to the Somalia attacks and less Boston.(Not less than to Somalia, just less than the saturation "coverage" we're being force-fed.)  Because the Boston bombing “coverage” so far has had almost no facts. The story consists in harping on blood, and on the exiguous scraps of info about the bombs.

Farcically, on the first day media people were saying on air “it's too early to speculate” and then proceeding to speculate at length, without benefit of actual information.

That makes it undeniable that the “coverage” is over the top, when there's nothing to report.

Predictably, Murdoch's minions choose to fill the information void with false “news,” like a Saudi in custody who wasn't.

Other false reports- 5 unexploded bombs found. (Not true.) And today, Wednesday, a false report of a suspect in custody. (FBI denies it.)

The media wants to make us sad about this. And sure, it saddens me to hear about the 8 year old boy who was killed, and whose sister lost a leg, and whose mother suffered brain damage. They were there to watch their father run the marathon. Will he be racked by guilt for having brought them, for entering the race? (We'll probably get a followup on that topic.) But what is the point of all this emotional manipulation? PEOPLE DIE EVERY DAY!! Get used to it.

There are bombings that kill more people- civilians- happening perhaps daily in Afghanistan. There are several a month, or more, in Pakistan.

Boko Haram bombings in Nigeria are routine.

How about Mexico? Tens of thousands a year slaughtered by drug gangs and the police. Piles of bodies are routinely found. That's not so far away.

And yes, the U.S. media reports it. From an emotional distance as if it's happening on the moon.

The people who died and were wounded in Boston are just as much strangers to me as the people who die violently in Mexico every day. Apparently

I care in that I don't want to be killed in a bombing that some scumbag planted because he could care less who he kills. Just as I don't want to be killed by some car jumping the curb while I'm walking down the sidewalk. The fact that there was malevolent intent in one and not the other doesn't make me any more or less dead.

And the truth is, no bomb planter is trying to kill me specifically. Nor you. Which means that it is irrational to feel that “the terrorists are targeting us.” Don't take it so personally. They just want to kill a bunch of people. Understand that and accept it as a hazard of living. One with an infinitesimal chance of killing you.

Unlike cancer. Or heart disease. Or a stroke. Or Alzheimer's. Which are literally MILLIONS more times likely to kill you.

In other words, be rational.

The government would save many, many more lives if it ignored terrorism (I'm not saying it should) and concentrated on reducing the amount of carcinogens we're all exposed to in the air, food, and water.

Death is an inevitable part of life. People die every day. People kill people every day. Is it worse to do it with a bomb than with a gun or a knife or a club or a broken bottle?

Ah, we get back to the motive. And the “randomness.”

Auto accidents are random.

I suppose some who are in a lather will be enraged that I'm not as enraged as they are. I refer them back to what I said at the beginning of this essay. I don't think I can be accused of solicitude for the perpetrators, or of not caring.

But as I am saying, all things should be put in proper perspective. And the media is totally over the top about this.

Day after, Morning Edition: NPR milking it for all it's worth: “It was an emotional reunion...” an NPR dame tells us, and we get a little girl blubbering. No one in the family was hurt. But it was scary!  

Are they trying to make everyone weak? (And all the more emotionally dependent on the Government for protection!)

  Boston Police chief - Monday, 4/15/13:

“We will not take this in stride.”

“There's been a horrendous loss of life... at least three people are dead.”

Man, I wish you would take it in stride. And if three dead is “horrendous,” I guess you never heard of Auschwitz, or Hiroshima, or a few thousand other examples I could cite, but hardly need to. Doesn't anyone ever die in Boston? No murders there before, Chief?

What an idiotic statement. Nothing like stressing people out and trying to make everyone into emotional wrecks.

It's not like we're living under a daily aerial bombardment, like some people have.

Like people in Vietnam, on which was dropped 6 million tons of bombs- triple the tonnage the U.S. dropped in all of World War II.

Hey Chief: Suck it up and get on with it, man.

Anti-Abortion Terrorists Still Allowed To Operate in the U.S.

It seems that the “War On Terrorism” really isn't, or is even more selective and hypocritical than that other excuse for political repression and convenient cover for various covert agendas, the “War On Drugs.”

Now an anti-abortion terrorist assassin is being allowed to incite murder from inside prison.

As always in matters involving terrorism (or so-called “terrorism” we should say when referring to protesters, activists, dissidents, and scholars branded with the label) the U.S. displays the most blatant double-standards, hypocrisy, and bad faith. Here we have yet another example of all that, thrown right in our faces.

Scott Roeder is a convicted political assassin currently instigating murder from inside a state prison in Kansas. Roeder is the hitman who assassinated Dr. George Tiller inside Tiller's church, shooting him dead in front of a full house of Tiller's fellow parishioners (he obviously wasn't worried about witnesses) in Wichita in 2009. Roeder (and his terrorist comrades) is now making death threats against the director of the recently reopened clinic he shut down by murdering Tiller. Roeder even targets the clinic director, Julie Burkhart, by name, turning her name into a slur- with a bit of projection I might add, a common psychological tic in reactionaries- calling her “Julie Darkheart” and saying menacingly that she is "kind of painting a target on her[self]." (Nice; blame the next victim for her own impending murder.)

Here's what else Roeder had to say:

     "To walk in there and reopen a clinic, a murder mill, where — where a man was

     stopped, you know, it’s almost like putting a target on your back, saying, 'Well, let's

     see if you can shoot me,’ you know? But, you know, I have to go back to what Mike —

     Pastor Mike Bray [1] said: If 100 abortionists were shot, they would probably go out of business. 

     So I think eight have been shot, so we’ve got 92 to go. And maybe she’ll be —

     maybe she’ll be number nine."

“A man was stopped;” i.e. Roeder murdered George Tiller, some nameless “man.” And those horrible abortionists are taunting the terrorists, “'let's see if you can shoot me,' you know?” says Roeder, imputing a death wish to the next designated victim. Why, those abortionists are just asking for it! Didn't they get OUR message from the previous murders? We want you to stop performing abortions! Do what we demand or we'll have no choice but to murder you. Sounds like any Islamofascist terrorist, doesn't it? Do what we want or we'll kill you. Roeder and his terrorist accomplices don't even feel the need to hide the identity of the Imam- I mean Pastor- egging them on to commit political murders. (Guess how long a Muslim religious leader would be allowed to walk the streets if he spoke like this.) And exactly like their Islamofascist ilk, these “Christians” claim divine religious and moral authority for their murders.

But this is fine with the state of Kansas and the U.S. Government. A terrorist assassin can openly goad his fellow terrorists to kill a named target, as long as it's a terrorist with a politically-approved goal, in this case the termination of abortion rights, the basic human right for more than half the population to control one's own body.

But wait, there's more. The anti-abortion terrorists are so emboldened by the liberal attitude of the state of Kansas and the Federal government towards them that they recorded the terroristic threats of the convict Roeder and posted them online on their own website. The local anti-abortion terrorist leader who did this apparently has no fear of prosecution, since he feels no need to hide his identity. Roeder also names an anti-abortion Holy Man (“Pastor Mike”) as an inciter of terrorism. That also would be used as evidence of conspiracy if the U.S. were inclined to enforce its own “anti-terrorism” laws and the law “protecting” clinics and providers. But the first of those laws are intended as political clubs against designated enemies domestic and foreign, the second as a sop to the part of the duped Democratic “base” that cares about women's rights, indeed the human right to be free of compulsory childbirth.

This isn't the first example of how anti-abortion terrorists are allowed to openly organize and instigate terrorist murders. There was- still is for all I know- a website death list of abortion providers with their names and addresses and other useful information for assassins. Whenever one was murdered, his name would be left on the list with a line crossed through it. Get the message?

The U.S. and state governments refused to lift a finger against this either. Instead it was left to terror victims to sue the terrorists by bringing a civil lawsuit against them. Of course, the terrorists claimed they were only innocently exercising their “right of free speech.” (Anti-abortion zealot Nat Hentoff took the terrorists' side with his usual excoriating arm-twisting sophistry, bludgeoning the victims of impending murder as awful free speech violators and shredders of the Bill of Rights. Over his career he has often taken the reactionary side in various controversies and painted it in civil liberties colors, spreading confusion with his ideological jui-jitsu. He also acted to disrupt and sabotage the ACLU from within. But that's another story that will have to wait its turn to be told.)

Roeder, shortly before he was allowed to murder Dr. Tiller, was caught red-handed by a clinic worker gluing the locks to their doors. Roeder was known to them. He'd been harassing and threatening them for some time, along with his terrorist collegues. The clinic reported this latest violation of the Federal clinic “protection” law to the local FBI agent. The agent brushed them off and told them it was a matter for the local county prosecutor, a known ally of the anti-abortionists. Of course enforcing Federal law is a Federal responsibility.

So just as the FBI aided and abetted the KKK by looking the other way when they committed their terrorism, so does the FBI studiously fail to enforce Federal law against anti-abortion terrorists.

To head off any possible embarrassment after the assassination, immediately following the murder of Tiller the image-obsessed FBI planted simultaneous puff pieces about themselves in both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. (This is an old police trick. The NYPD did the same thing to divert the NY Times from pursuing a negative story about them by planting that bogus tale about the murder of Kitty Genovese (that falsely painted her neighbors as indifferent bystanders) with A.M .Rosenthal, a notorious propagandist. Thus was born a zombie myth that can't be killed. [See “The Witnesses That Didn't,” transcript or audio, On The Media radio show, WNYC.] (2)

And the terrorist Roeder is not only allowed to communicate freely from within prison, he is allowed to goad people to commit more murders.

Contrast that with the treatment meted out to people the U.S. labels terrorists, which it refuses to do with anti-abortion terrorists. (The anti-abortion terrorists may not be terrorist, but the Occupy Movement is, says the FBI.) Consider the case of the “blind Egyptian sheik,” Omar Abdel-Rahman. Or rather, that of his former attorney.

It isn't enough to satisfy the U.S. to hold Abdel-Rahman incommunicado for life. The U.S. imprisoned his lawyer, Lynne Stewart, on a ten year sentence, for circumventing the blockade of her client by passing a press release to Reuters, with a message aimed at his followers in Egypt, to reconsider their “truce” with the U.S. client dictator and torturer, Hosni Mubarak. (Since overthrown, no thanks to the U.S.) Stewart is now being left to die of cancer in a U.S. dungeon in Texas. Her crime? “Conspiracy to provide material support to terrorism.” (3)

Meanwhile Roeder is allowed to call for the murder of an abortion clinic manager. And there won't be any prosecutions or ten year stretches in the pen for the terrorist leaders and Christian Holy Men for passing his message on to domestic terrorists, not to mention for openly inciting murders and bombings right here inside the U.S. Meanwhile, the terrorists work their way down their list of 100 murder victims.

Let's see if they now even block Roeder from continuing to incite murder from within prison, or so much as restrict his privileges in any way.

And what do you suppose the Federal and local “authorities” will do to protect Burkhart, the one “with a target on her back”? Why, they'll go and warn her that her life “may be” in danger. As if she doesn't know that. And then they'll leave this part unspoken: You're on your own, toots.

Thanks a million, officer.

Roeder's threat in and of itself is evidence of conspiracy and intent, a clear piece of evidence of a premeditated, calculated plan to murder 100 abortion providers for the political purpose of ending abortion by violence. Yet this is allowed in the U.S. Contrast that with the man recently sentenced to 17 years in prison for translating Al-Qaeda statements he accessed online, and only for doing that, not for any “links” or “connections to” Al-Qaeda, which weren't even alleged by the Government.

What's that you say? That's different? Al-Qaeda terrorists threaten the lives of millions of Americans? That's a bit of an exaggeration. Al-Qaeda threatens the lives of millions of Americans the same way that lightning threatens the lives of millions of Americans- as something that might theoretically strike anyone. But anti-abortion terrorists do impinge on the rights of millions, and are now threatening to end those rights for millions. That is actually a far more substantial threat than what Al-Qaeda poses to people in America. (4)

But it's not just the destruction of the rights of over a hundred million people that is the political goal of the anti-abortion terrorists. Anyone forced to get an illegal abortion is at significant risk of death. So in actual fact millions of lives will be put at some risk when these terrorists achieve their goal, and thousands of women will die if- or when- the anti-abortionists achieve their victory through terror.

There have been countless acts of terrorism against abortion clinics and workers over the past few decades. Almost none have ever been prosecuted. There are many more acts of intimidation, and even more of harassment, and against patients too.

The State government of Kansas happens to be controlled by anti-abortionists. And the anti-abortion movement and its terrorist wing shelters under the protection of right-wing Protestantism. Christianity is politically powerful in America, just as Islam is powerful in other countries. Indeed, many of these Christians overtly lay claim on the right to control America, claiming that it is a “Christian” country, that the Christian nature of the U.S. is embedded in the U.S. Constitution. (It isn't, but no amount of pointing this out stops these fanatics from bellowing this falsehood as undisputed fact. As Reagan once said in a convention speech, “facts are stupid things.” It is higher ideological “truth” that matters and that trumps mere facts every time.) Apparently envious of their counterparts in Iran, Saudi Arabia, and increasingly Israel, they are trying to turn the U.S. into a theocracy- using as cover claims of “religious freedom” and spurious history about the foundation of the U.S.

Nor is the attack on women's right to control their own bodies an isolated case of an establishment-sponsored reactionary “backlash” (recrudescence of “popular” repression). Rather, it is one of the clearest examples of the establishment's assiduous attempts to roll back the human rights gains in the U.S.- gains that came about as a result of social resistance and ferment over roughly ten years from the early 1960s to the early 1970s. The ongoing assault on abortion rights has been aided and abetted by the U.S. establishment every step of the way. It has always thrown its weight behind the anti-abortionists and left those providing the service out on a limb, isolated and alone. The very fact that abortion, a medical procedure, is forced to be provided in stand-alone clinics, instead of in hospitals or gynecologists' offices, sets it apart from the medical establishment (which is totally craven about abortion) and makes it vulnerable to attack by anti-abortion fanatics.

The anti-abortion movement and its terrorist wing has been very successful in gradually strangling abortion rights in the U.S. 48 out of 50 states now have fewer abortion providers than in 1978- 35 years ago, when the U.S. population was considerably smaller. And the number of physicians and clinics providing abortions have fallen by 25 percent since the 1990s. Some states are down to a single abortion provider in the entire state, such as Mississippi and North Dakota, which are repressive states to begin with. The providers in those states are in their death throes as their GOP state governments strangle them with anti-Roe laws and regulations.

Now that the Republican Party has seized control of the majority of state governments, they have saddled women with scores of repressive laws designed to make obtaining abortions more onerous and to drive clinics out of business. Planned Parenthood, most of whose activities consists in providing vital gynecological and cancer screening for poor women (since the feckless state and Federal governments refuse to serve the needs of the people they reign over) is under fierce assault in primitive states such as Texas, including having its funding cut off.

The anti-abortion movement is buttressed by the backing of the GOP, the Catholic Church, fundamentalist Protestant ministries and organizations, right-wing democrats, and looked on with sympathy by the reactionary-dominated secret police and corporate media.

Publicly the establishment media either poses as a disinterested bystander in the losing struggle to defend abortion rights (while hiding and minimizing the viciousness of the assault) or openly acts as megaphones for anti-abortion propaganda in the case of “conservative” (i.e. openly reactionary) media mouthpieces. Politicians basically can be grouped into three camps: reactionaries who rabidly oppose abortion rights; jellyfish who are indifferent and basically float on the prevailing political tide (the corporate media obfuscate the nature of this type of pol by mislabeling them “moderates,” a meaningless term that implies reasonableness with the implication of unreasonableness by “extremes” to the “left” and right of the “moderates”); and a small group from areas with large constituencies who oppose state-enforced childbearing, typically tagged as “liberals,” which in U.S. political discourse has been turned into an epithet thanks to 30 years of intentional political propaganda by the corporate oligarchy's media.

A clear example of the establishment's support for anti-abortionists is the permissive attitude of the power structure towards the terrorism of the anti-abortionists. The terrorists are allowed free rein until they actually murder someone. Then only a single individual is ever imprisoned- the triggerman. Most of the time they aren't sentenced to death. The network of co-conspirators and supporters who aid and abet and harbor the murderers is never touched. They aren't prosecuted. They aren't hauled before Grand Juries (at least that I've ever seen reported) and forced to divulge what they know. They aren't infiltrated (that we know of, and we probably would by now). No conspiracy cases are brought.

In short, no attempt is made to quash the anti-abortion terrorist movement. (5) It's activities are largely ignored by both the corporate media and the police. Instead the people who do the screaming outside clinics is presented to us as a morally committed “pro-life” movement.

Speaking of incitement, the noxious demagogue Bill O'Reilly, one of the creatures in the Murdoch-Ailes stable of braying agit-propagandists, spent the week before Tiller's assassination instigating his murder by calling him a murderer. (Ever notice how fascists and reactionaries are constantly inverting reality, and also projecting onto others the traits and behavior of themselves they wish to disown?) (6)

The coddling of the terrorist arm of the anti-abortion movement isn't unique. Anti-abortion terrorists aren't the only U.S.-protected terrorists who are A-OK because the U.S. approves their cause- the “anti-Castro” CIA-mentored Cuban exile fascist terrorists based in Florida and parts of New Jersey are another notorious example.

Or take the KKK, out of favor lately, which was allowed to operate for decades and involved in the execution of several thousand blacks who were lynched or murdered in “vigilante” violence. (Since when are sheriffs, their deputies, and state and local government officials, who were all involved with Klan terrorism and were even members of the Klan, “vigilantes”? This is governmental action, state terrorism, hiding behind the hoods of the Klan, a convenient terrorist front organization.)

Seems that state sponsored or coddled terrorism, domestic terrorism, is a U.S. habit. And that's leaving aside U.S. sponsorship of state terrorism abroad in Indonesia (Suharto), the Phillippines (Marcos), Iran under the Shah, Nicaragua under Somoza, Pinochet in Chile, Guatemala since 1954, Argentina, El Salvador, Paraguay, Uruguay, Peru...the list can cause the eyes to glaze over. That's the trouble. It's so much to absorb, to learn about, that there's too much information to crack the wall of chauvinistic propaganda that most Americans have built into their brains. Let's stick to what happens within the citadel walls of the U.S. empire.

I wonder why the “alternative” media does not make these connections, highlight these obvious contradictions and blatant double-standards, and denounce the establishment for its de facto support of actual domestic terrorism? Making people aware of aspects of reality they are unconscious of is what we call consciousness-raising. And consciousness-raising is the first step in forcing real change in the benighted heartland of this evil empire.

If the alternative media actually wants to change things, it needs to engage in consciousness-raising in a systematic way. Not just try to “make a difference,” a namby-pamby pseudo-goal that bespeaks a craven fear of the power establishment. (“Don't worry, we don't really want to change anything. We just want to make a tiny mark of a palliative sort that no one will object to”- no one except fanatical reactionaries of course, those barking ideological junkyard guard-dogs of “free market” capitalism- i.e. anything-goes capitalism.)

Until there is a rekindling of militancy, the terrorists, their reactionary backers, and most of all the establishment power structure, will continue to inexorably squeeze abortion rights (and all our other basic human rights) until those rights are snuffed out entirely. The key element that is missing here is the outrage and militancy and commitment to fight that gained the advances in human rights in the first place. An attitude change on the part of activists and as broad a section of the public that can be aroused is step one. One has to get angry first.

1) I needn't say anything about the Holy Man's name- Bray. I'm sure he does what his name indicates. A novelist might pick that perfect name for such a character.

2) But maybe the FBI simply has its hands full trolling for angry, naïve, not too bright young men from Islamic backgrounds who they can groom and goad for a year until they inveigle them into “terrorist conspiracies” with FBI undercover agents and informers, create an FBI theater piece with a fake bomb and detonator as props, hand it to their pigeon, and arrest the angry young fool as a “jihadist terrorist” with a splashy announcement in the media. There go those intrepid G-Men again, protecting America from attack! I'm so grateful, aren't you? Interestingly, those little political theater productions are getting increasingly tepid reviews from the corporate media.

3) Before some nitpicker argues that I'm an idiot who doesn't understand the difference between the Federal Government and a state government like Kansas, and that Stewart is a Federal case and Roeder a state case, three points: Roeder committed a Federal crime too when he murdered Tiller, and could have been prosecuted under Federal law. (And still could be- the statute of limitations for many Federal crimes is ten years. And no, double jeopardy doesn't apply for charging someone for the same act in both state and Federal courts. The Supreme Court settled that issue years ago. And it happens. For example, after the acquittal on state charges of the Los Angeles cops who brutally beat Rodney King and were videoed doing it- the only reason they were charged- there was a major riot lasting several days, and the LAPD ran off the streets with their tails between their legs. This political situation forced the Federal government to then prosecute the cops, and they were convicted. Maybe women need to riot over this? Oops! Watch my mouth! The Federal Government will indict me for “incitement.” Not Roeder, not Bray, not any of the anti-abortion terrorists.) But don't expect the Obama regime to take any action. Obama doesn't give a rat's ass about abortion rights. He'd rather persecute whistleblowers and cut Social Security- and cozy up the GOP, if only they'd let him.

Secondly, most if not all states did what the Federal Government did, and used the 9/11/01 attacks as a golden opportunity to pass yet more repressive legislation, hopping on the “War on Terror”^TM bandwagon and eagerly following in Congress' footsteps with their very own “anti-terrorism” laws. Kansas no doubt has these. Thirdly, no American prison authorities anywhere are helpless to punish and control prisoners even for doing nothing, much less for instigating felonies while in custody.

The larger point of course is that some terrorism doesn't count as terrorism, some terrorists are allowed to operate, whereas other political tendencies (including violent ones) are prosecuted as “terrorism” even when they're wholly non-violent, or the “violence” consists of arson or even mere vandalism. Roeder and his comrades meet even the ostensible U.S. definition of terrorism, namely politically-motivated violence intended to affect people's or Government's behavior. The political motive is overt. And the goal here is stated quite openly- to permanently force the closing of abortion clinics by violence. Legally it would be a slam dunk for prosecutors. Law is not the reason these terrorists are allowed such leeway. Politics and ideology is.

4) As it gets harder and harder to press people's panic buttons by flashing an image of a burning World Trade Center tower in front of their faces for the ten zillionth time, there's always that surefire tactic of invoking “weapons of mass destruction” to make Al-Qaeda seem very very scary. Or should I say, “WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION!!” By the way, the FBI just entrapped an American who was fighting the Assad regime in Syria for “using a weapon of mass destruction” there- a rocket propelled grenade. So hold on to your wallet when you hear that term.

And since Al-Qaeda is this diabolical global menace, it thus follows that it's very words must be suppressed, by force, including harsh imprisonment for unauthorized disseminators of those words, because all of us must be prevented from hearing what they think, be prevented from understanding them better (understanding is NOT the same as “condoning” “supporting” “sympathizing with” etc., much less siding with or joining, contrary to what the secret police, delegated to monitor us, believe) lest a few people exposed to those words agree with them and even attempt to join their cause. The U.S. insist on this. And their word is law, literally, enforced by a massive police state.

And it's not just Al-Qaeda's words that are dangerous to touch. So are the Taliban's. And Hamas'. Also Hezbollah's. And those of various Iranian state bodies. And of “associated forces” (whoever they are, and you won't know until you're indicted, arrested, and imprisoned for quoting the wrong one). Oh, and the FARC's. And whoever else the U.S. doesn't like today, and puts on the “terrorist” shitlist, even if they're secretly negotiating with them (Taliban) or will hail tomorrow (MEK, ANC, for two examples of ex-terrorist organizations, formerly the blackest of evil people, now given a clean bill of health by the U.S.). Or, for that matter, current puppet outfits like the PLO, who were “terrorists” until they were turned into stooges of the U.S. and Israel.

Of course you'll still be in prison anyway. So be careful who you quote or translate. Be very very careful! Why, they might even indict you for quoting yesterday someone they put on the list today.

“Can they do that?” They've made much bigger stretches than that, my friend, when they target someone.

5) While turning a benevolent blind eye to the thuggery and terrorism of the anti-abortion movement, the establishment has proven quite motivated to crush the Occupy Movement, the black militant movement, the Puerto Rican independence movement, and going farther back in time, the anarchist movement, the opposition to World War I, the socialist movement, the Industrial Workers of the World, the attempts to crush the labor organizing movement, the civil rights movement, the anti-slavery movement, and whatever other movements I left out. They seem to be able to squelch even sizable movements when they want to, much less terrorist gangs.

6) While Bill O'Reilly can freely incite murder, protesters considered leftists (aka “terrorists” in police and secret police lingo) are routinely arrested on spurious “incitement” charges. Incitement to violence, incitement to disorderly conduct, incitement to littering, anything will do, and does, as an excuse to break up political opposition through fraudulent arrests.

Of course, O'Reilly and his co-conspirators Murdoch and Ailes are “protected” by the First Amendment, unlike Occupy Movement demonstrators, or anti-G8 or anti-World Trade Organization or anti-NATO protesters. O'Reilly et al have First Amendment “rights.” Actually, that's wrong. They have First Amendment privileges. If it was a right, the protesters would have them too.