Terrorism & Western States. posted by Richard Seymour

Where we have been encouraged to believe that we are dealing with a pure antagonism between the West and this nebulous thing called 'terrorism', what we are actually dealing with in most cases is a marriage made in hell. The word 'terrorism' itself, Christopher Hitchens used to muse, is an abuse. Just he would not have called the Vietnamese resistance 'terrorist', I won't call the Iraqi resistance 'terrorist'. However, as we're stuck with the term, I'll just have to make best use I can of it.

America, fuck yeah...
Terrorism has frequently formed a cornerstone of US foreign policy, most often through aggressive policies of counter-insurgency. From 1961 onward, initiatives described as Unconventional Warfare (UW) became part of the range of policies officially mandated by the US government. Just ten days after Kennedy's inauguration, the National Security Council started to work on a series of proposals for an "expanded guerilla programme", enhancing Special Forces numbers to 4,000, and an immediate budget allocation of $19 million to set it in motion. (See National Security Action Memorandum 2, most of which remains classified).

There had been some military concerns over some of the guerilla tactics used by Special Forces, who were increasingly insulated from the regular army. This remained the case as the new administration took power. (See Office of the Chief of Psychological Warfare, Record Group 319 of the National Security Archives). Kennedy justified these policies in public by referring to the threat of "the free world" being "nibbled away at the periphery ... by forces of subversion, infiltration, intimidation, indirect or nonovert aggression, internal revolution, diplomatic blackmail, guerilla warfare, or a series of limited wars." (Quoted here). But the uses of terror were much broader. In 1962, a memorandum was drafted by the Joint Chiefs of Staff outlining a terrorist campaign that the US could conduct against its own citizens in order to justify war with Cuba:

"We could develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington. The terror campaign could be pointed at Cuban refugees seeking haven in the United States. We could sink a boatload of Cubans enroute [sic] to Florida (real or simulated). We could foster attempts on lives of Cuban refugees in the United States even to the extent of wounding in instances to be widely publicized."

This was known as Operation Northwoods. It was rejected at the time, and instead a series of attacks focused on Cuba was initiated, known as Operation Mongoose. Since then, a number of attacks orchestrated by the United States have been carried out on Cuban soil, and I don't know that it is altogether coincidental that a number of Cuban nationals being harboured in the US are responsible for some such attacks: explosions in Hotels, airline hi-jackings, the kinds of things that terrorists get up to. (Check out the biography of Luis Posada Carriles).


Luis Posada Carriles

Counterinsurgency terror campaigns were also organised in Vietnam and the Phillipines by the US. "Selected Vietnamese troops were organised into terror squads ... Within a short time, Viet Cong leaders ... began to die mysteriously and violently in their beds." (Human Factors Considerations of Undergrounds in Insurgencies). Similar tactics had been used to suppress the Huk rebellion in the Phillipines from 1946 to 1954, while a US-directed counter-insurgency terror campaign in Guatemala killed 8,000 people in two provinces alone in the six months from October 1966. (Michael McClintock, The American Connection: State Terror and Popular Resistance in El Salvador, vol 2, 1984).

There are scores of other well-known examples: the support for right-wing death squads in Colombia, Angola, Nicaragua, El Salvador and the Dominican Republic is well-documented, particularly in William Blum's Killing Hope: U. S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, 1995). And I've talked a bit about the use of death squads by the UK and Spanish governments here and here. (Note, in particular, the linked article in the latter post which outlines a Special Branch connection to the explosion in Omagh in 1998).


Victims of Salvadoran death squads.

A couple of other examples, then. Here we come to the use of terrorism by states with the intention of justifying war & repression and discrediting opposition movements. Operation Gladio is correctly pointed to as an instance of just such practise. But where all of the above can be subsumed into a Cold War narrative (or, in the case of Northern Ireland, the closing chapters of the British Empire), the last two examples bear directly on the 'war on terror': and if they don't involve Western states, they at least involve regimes strongly supported by the West.

Russian roulette
Russia has been conducting a war on Chechnya since 1999, following the failure of its first war to recapture the break-away republic between 1994 and 1996 - a war which killed 100,000 people and wounded some 240,000 others. Planning began for a new assault six months before a number of explosions rocked Moscow (in August and September 1999) and Chechnya mounted an invasion of Dagestan. When the explosions hit, a number of apartment buildings were destroyed and 300 people killed. A number of fingers pointed at the FSB, and one whistleblower who claims the FSB were behind the attacks has been evading Russian prosecution ever since. Extraordinary investigations by the Observer and a Channel Four Dispatches programme (both summarised neatly here, also see John Sweeney in The Observer), found that following the first two apartment block explosions, a third building was targeted 100 miles south of Moscow. A bomb was uncovered there by Russian police after a tip-off, and three men arrested. The three men were not Chechens but Russian. And they were not guerilla operatives but FSB agents - and all three were released. The FSB subsequently claimed that it was not a bomb at all, but a reporter for the Novaya Gazeta, a newspaper known for its criticism of Putin's government, uncovered evidence from soldiers guarding the suspected device at a nearby military base that it was in fact a bomb. One soldier "took a sample to a military commander schooled in explosives who said it was hexagen". (Cited here). Of course, this could all be a confection for the overheated imagination, since, as one contribution on wikipedia points out: "As well as the conspiracy thejries about the Zionist Oppressive Government polt to destroy the World Trade Center during the 9/11, this theories have a lot of fans."


After a truck bomb in Volgodonsk.

Not to stop at that pithy judgment, however, it is worth pointing out that there is evidence that the Russian state has a long history of involvement with (and presumably, manipulation of) the Islamist wing of the Chechen resistance. As Patrick Cockburn wrote in The Independent:

Cooperation between Mr Basayev and the Russian army is not so surprising as it sounds. In 1992-93 he is widely believed to have received assistance from the GRU when he and his brother Shirvani fought in Abkhazia, a breakaway part of Georgia. Russia did not want to act overtly against Georgia but covertly supported a battalion of volunteers led by Mr Basayev.

It is now alleged that the cooperation between the GRU and Shirvani Basayev went further. The invasion of Dagestan might be resented in Russia, but it was insufficient to mobilise Russian public opinion. This only occurred when four massive bombs exploded in Russia in September. The first, at a military housing complex at Buinaksk in Dagestan, blew up on 4 September killing 83 people. The next two were targeted at ordinary Russian civilians. On 8 and 13 September explosives demolished two working-class apartment blocks in south Moscow leaving 228 men, women and children dead. Three days later a truck exploded in Volgodonsk.

It was the wave of anger and hatred among Russians against Chechens, universally blamed for the attacks, that gave Mr Putin the backing he needed to invade Chechnya. An unknown figure when appointed, with just 2 per cent support in the polls, he was soon the leading candidate to win the presidency.

The Russian anti-Stalinist left-winger Boris Kagarlitsky claims in the same article that Russian intelligence used their connections with Basayev not only to plant the bombs but also to prompt a quasi-comical invasion of Dagestan - when Basayev's forces were easily beaten off, Russian helicopters had to escort them back to the front line. Incidentally, it bears mention that Basayev's forces are widely believed to be linked to and funded by Osama bin Laden. Russian intelligence in bed with Al Qaeda - whatever next?

The Second Battle of Algiers
This. The story is a relatively simple one: an Islamist party won a democratic election in November 1991, and the ruling class decided that it preferred the bullet to the ballot box. The military nullified the elections and forced President Chadli Benjedid to resign. The story goes that a splinter of the FIS named the GIA broke away and began to start a splodin' shit everywhere, and thus a civil war ensued. That civil war was brought to the Metro system in Paris through several nightmarish explosions. Luckily, the bad guys were mostly caught or killed, and peace was restored for free elections - even if some extremists inexplicably keep wading in blood.

The civil war was certainly bloody. Amnesty International reported in 1997 that:

Men, women and children have been slaughtered, decapitated, mutilated and burned to death in massacres. The large scale of the massacres of civilians of the past year have taken place against a background of increasingly widespread human rights abuses by government security forces, state-armed militias and armed opposition groups. Arbitrary and secret detention, unfair trial, torture and ill-treatment, including rape, ‘disappearances’, extrajudicial executions, deliberate and arbitrary killings of civilians, hostage-taking and death threats have become routine. As the toll of victims continues to rise, the climate of fear has spread through all sectors of civilian society(Amnesty International, November 1997. Algeria: Civilian Population Caught in a Spiral of Violence).

Algerian grave following massacre.

Indeed, where GIA operatives have been accused of violent attacks - it is beyond doubt that they have committed many - it is also worth noting that the government used this as a handy excuse to commit its own atrocities. Amnesty reported: "[M]ost of the massacres took place near the capital, Algiers, and in the Bilder and Medea regions, in the most heavily militarised part of the country. Often, massacres were committed in villages situated close to army barracks and security forces posts, and in some cases survivors reported that army security forces were stationed nearby". (Cited here). Dr Amirouche, a former FLN fighter (and by no means a friend of the Islamists), wrote in 1998 of how "the military regime is perpetuating itself by fabricating and nourishing a mysterious monster to fight, but it is demonstrating daily its failure to perform its most elementary duty: providing security for the population. In October 1997, troubling reports 73 suggested that a faction of the army, dubbed the "land mafia," might actually be responsible for some of last summer’s massacres, which occured in Islamist strongholds and continued even after the Islamic Salvation Army, the armed wing of the FIS, called for a truce, in effect as of October 1, 1997." (The story about the "land mafia" cleansing land for subsequent privatisation came from the French magazine Paris-Match).

Robert Fisk wrote of "evidence that [massacred villagers] were themselves Islamists", while the Sunday Times noted that a particularly gruesome massacre of over 1,000 villagers in early 1998 took place "within 500 yards of an army base that did not deploy a single soldier, despite the fact that the gunfire and screams would have been clearly audible". (Cited here). Meanwhile, John Sweeney wrote for the Observer of an Algerian military officer who had informed Le Monde that not only were the government's secret services responsible for some of the most grotesque attacks, but the GIA itself was a creature of the government. The officer who blew the whistle on this died shortly afterwards in a helicopter crash.

This had come after an exposé by John Sweeney and Leonard Doyle in The Guardian, in which they were informed by a former career agent in Algeria's secret services that not only was the GIA a product of Algerian intelligence, but that this intelligence service had "organised 'at least' two of the bombs in Paris in the summer of 1995, in which several people were killed. The operation was run by Colonel Souames Mahmoud, alias Habib, head of the secret service at the Algerian embassy in Paris." Similar claims were later made by the former Prime Minister of Algeria, Dr Abdel Hameed al-Ibrahimi. (Cited here).

Coda
Terrorism is often described as a weapon of the weak, and this is true to the extent that the tactic is frequently used by groups that are the weakest in a particular confrontation: the IRA, Palestinians, Farc, Tamil Tigers etc. But it may also be a weapon of the weak in another sense. States which know that they cannot rule through persuasion - ie, are not hegemonic - often resort to such tactics. Penny Green and Tony Ward, authors of State Crimes: Governments, Violence, and Corruption, (Pluto Press, 2003), write that the decision to resort to death squads and other forms of repression directed at civilians is related to their relative ability to fulfil their goals as states and also meet the demands of citizens in other ways. They note that in Latin American countries where it was much more difficult to satisfy peasant demands, the recourse to terror was much more severe. On the other hand, the use of terror by powerful and relatively stable states - the UK, United States, Russia & Spain to name a few - indicates that the tactic of terrorism is an all too familiar tool for the powerful.