I woke Dec 26th to the startling news that a terrorist attack was launched against a commercial airline. Possible links to the all-ominous "al-Qaeda" were mentioned. Nigeria linked. A plane headed for Detroit, Michigan. Yemen
It seemed a long way from 9/11 and so many suspiciously failed attempts to commit terror on US soil again, and this particular young man, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the son of a prominent Nigerian banker, reportedly had the noxious ingredients to do the deed. But once again, he was foiled by his own stupidity.
At any rate, fortune, not the highly funded, bloated US security services had it that the passengers and crew arrived safely for Christmas.
Pres Barack Obama offered a mea culpa, saying this goof was a systemic failure.
But he is as wrong as US Dept of Homeland Security policy, thankfully no longer a secret from the masses after another goof published its Standard Operating Procedures on the Internet.
Inasmuch as this story of the Nigerian would-be bomber is truth, inasmuch as this was an organized terrorist attack, what this represents is an institutional failure, not a systemic one. And the only thing our defense systems are doing is keeping the population in fear so as to continue the evil Bush doctrines of robbing us of our rights in secret trials, secret prisons, renditions, and police powers.
Eight CIA agents will never again celebrate a holiday with their friends and families, and this is sad. But that they were killed in the midst of the US occupation and assault on Afghanistan and the region should give us pause. These agents weren't there to plant crops or dig ditches to install plumbing for clean, running water to the poor villages.
Conventional wisdom out of Washington says they were there protecting the US. Well, they weren't protecting our freedoms, since those seem to continue to get carved away. Wiser more astute heads will recall the history or at least know the earth has no Chosen People, not even the exceptionalist US.
But all that secrecy and why a lone, Nigerian bomber, like Abdulmutallab, (or a small cabal of them) should want to cause destruction on such a holy day must not be answered with cries that they hate our freedoms.
The more unpopular, penetrating question is how are our purportedly noble institutions creating these villains and why should they want to attack our troops, our commercial airlines, and even eight CIA agents.
Could our occupations of huge swaths of the Mideast and Asia have anything to do with it? Might the US support of brutal dictatorships who suppress the people and keep them in a virtual Dark Age of religious superstition? How about those drones who continue to bomb soft targets - that is, neighborhoods, men, women, and children noncombatants? Do these things win hearts and minds, and does the US really care about their hearts or minds unless they are splashed against bullet-riddled masonry?
I cannot intentionally say much factual about this Abdulmutallab, so I do not want to demonize him or aggrandize him into a terrorist attacker. Scores of Black and Brown and Poor people are killed daily in the US, many by the police, but these are diminished in the back pages.
I am intrigued that Abdulmutallab is not the first educated person to be swayed to the supposed Dark Side. John Walker Lindh is serving a 20-year sentence for his role. Another educated American, Anwar al Awlaki, became a convert to Islam and left for Yemen where he embraced Jihad and reportedly met with said Nigerian.
These people aren't motivated by systemic failures and goofs but rather by Western institutions, and we need to face this.
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