US government fans homeland terrorism fear

Washington consensus plans for martial law, nuclear terror holocaust, behind closed doors by Larry Chin

Global Research, May 15, 2007

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The US government and Washington elites are aggressively ramping up their "war on terrorism" rhetoric and propaganda, stoking fear and paranoia in order to bolster their war agenda, and reinvigorate the mass public perception of new and growing "homegrown terrorism" threats to the US homeland. The next phase of America’s war abroad (under the management of a post-Bush neocon/neoliberal consensus), and the deepening militarization of the US homeland towards a full police state, are well underway. Who or what was behind the Fort Dix Six? On May 8, 2007, six foreign-born Muslims were arrested during an attempt to purchase assault weapons, and accused of plotting a terror attack on Fort Dix (New Jersey), as well as an assault on a Pennsylvania Navy installation. While evidence regarding this case continues to unfold, what is clear is that the FBI and US intelligence had been infiltrated and monitored over an extensive period, as early as January 2006. An unnamed "shadowy informer", likely an intelligence asset, is the key figure behind this operation and the arrest. An objective analysis of the Fort Dix incident leads to questions about US military-intelligence involvement, and the use of the incident as a pretext: "There is no doubt that the actions of the US military around the world are provoking a level of disgust and anger that could well produce misguided terrorist attacks within the US itself. Nonetheless, the various terrorist ‘plots’ exposed by the Bush administration have virtually without exception been characterized by a similar lack of any real preparation for violence combined with the central role of a covert informant/agent provocateur." In each of these cases, the supposed conspiracy has been heavily publicized in a transparent bid to justify the ongoing military occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan and to create a climate of fear in order to suppress democratic rights in the US itself. "The exposure of the latest alleged plot has coincided with an unprecedented political crisis for the administration. With the president’s standing in the polls falling to record lows and US military casualties in Iraq increasing as the quagmire in the occupied country deepens, the political motive for unveiling another supposed terrorist threat from within is abundantly clear." The Fort Dix suspects allegedly came to the attention of authorities after one of them was fingered by a Circuit City store manager while requesting to dub a terrorism training videotape from VHS to DVD. This bungling is reminiscent of the actions of the so-called 9/11 hijackers (all of them guided US intelligence assets), and suggests low-level and amateurish "patsies", guided and set up by larger forces. This foiled "spectacular" terror plot comes shortly after the bizarre Virginia Tech massacre (which, perhaps coincidentally, bears striking similarities to other "manchurian candidate" incidents such as the Robert F. Kennedy assassination and the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan by John Hinckley) successfully sparked fear across the country, and ignited new calls from citizens to "make our children safe". The clear political beneficiary of both the Fort Dix and V Tech episodes are the same: Homeland Security. The emerging "homegrown" threat When asked if the Fort Dix arrests had any connection to Al-Qaeda, the Bush administration immediately stated that there is "no direct evidence of a foreign terrorist tie". This telling break, from the administration’s known pattern (seizing every opportunity to attribute violence to "Al-Qaeda", "Islamo-fascists", etc.) suggests that the new and overriding "war on terrorism" imperative favored by the Washington neocon-neoliberal consensus involves the threat of "homegrown" terrorism. According to FBI agent J.P. Weis, who announced the arrest of the Fort Dix suspects, "these homegrown terrorists can prove to be as dangerous as any known group, if not more so. They operate under the radar." This rhetoric coincides with a larger effort on the part of elite policy shapers to manufacture, and sell, a nightmare scenario to an American public that is beginning to distrust its government, at the very moment that the real possibility of a resource-depleted post-Peak Oil American dystopia, the decline of the American empire, is beginning to hit home in earnest. The "Preventive Defense Project": martial law and nuclear holocaust in the United States In a series of closed-door sessions in Washington, a panel of high level government and military officials, security "experts" are constructing a homeland security plan that would include martial law and the suspension of civil liberties. See: Contigencies for nuclear terrorist attack: government working up plan to prevent chaos in wake of bombing of major city: Financed and organized by a joint Stanford-Harvard program known as the "Preventative Defense Project", and led by the hawkish former Clinton administration defense secretary William Perry, and Harvard’s Ashton Carter (another Clinton defense department official), this panel of 41 "security experts", directors of US nuclear weapons labs, and Homeland Security officials operatives are constructing a "blueprint" for the scenario that "Al-Qaeda" or another terrorist group with nuclear weapons will strike the United States. The panel has concluded that such a terror strike would cause catastrophic destruction and death, "cause a possible disintegration of government order", halt economic activity and unravel social order itself. The overriding objective of this panel, therefore, revolves around ways to maintain "order" and control the civilian populace. In a workshop called "The Day After", panel declared that preventing such a terror strike (similar in size to a Hiroshima-style detonation) was no longer enough, and that the "collapse of government order was so great, that a contingency plan is needed. In an example of breathless and hawkish speculation, Carter declared: "We have had glimpses of something like this with Hiroshima, and glimpses with 9/11 and Katrina. But those are only glimpses. If one bomb goes off, there are likely to be more to follow. This fact, that nuclear terrorism will appear as a syndrome rather than as a single episode, has major consequences". (The chaos of all three historical incidents cited by Carter were the result of government-orchestrated criminal aggression, two of them mass murders of the domestic US population. Carter, of course, did not acknowledge this.) Another panelist was Fred Ikle, former defense department official during the Reagan-Bush Iran/Contra era, and author of a 2006 book, "Annihilation from Within". Ikle’s book, and his work on the panel, aggressively promotes the suspension of civil liberties and the imposition of martial law. Steven Fetter, dean of the University of Maryland School of Public Policy, and one of the panelists, believes that "cities would empty and people would completely lose confidence in the ability of the government to protect them. You’d have nothing that resembles our current social order. I’m not sure any preparation can be sufficient to deal with that." Like many others, Fetter pushes the unfounded assumption that the US government protects its citizens, ignoring the fact (exemplified by 9/11 and the "war on terrorism") that the civilian populace is under ongoing attack from the government itself. It is no surprise that these policies are being hatched behind closed doors, by elites, and military-intelligence operatives and other "architects of reality", with no involvement from the citizenry. It is, however, yet another ominous sign of things to come. Nothing has been done to undo the Patriot Act, or end such things as illegal domestic spying and surveillance of American citizens. Nothing will be. The world’s elites, from the "Preventive Defense Project" to the Council on Foreign Relations and other intelligence "think tanks", are actively engineering future policies for a nightmare scenario (both the orchestration of scenario itself, as with 9/11, as well as in response to "disorder" and civilian unrest. Real and fake terrorism: products of Washington It is a fact that "Islamic terrorism" has always been a "homegrown" product. "Al Qaeda" and "Militant Islam" are creations of, and guided assets still working at the behest of, Anglo-American intelligence (the CIA, Pakistan’s ISI, etc.). Anglo-American involvement behind "terrorism", and the manufacture of the "war on terrorism", exhaustively documented in Michel Chossudovsky’s America's "War on Terrorism" , Michael C. Ruppert’s Crossing the Rubicon:The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil , and other investigations, continue to be the focus of ongoing official cover-up. (See: Who is Osama bin Laden?, Al-Qaeda:the database) As Michel Chossudovsky points out in "The Anglo-American War of Terror: An Overview": "One of the main objectives of war propaganda is to ‘fabricate an enemy’. As anti-war sentiment grows and the political legitimacy the Bush Administration falters, doubts regarding the existence of this illusive ‘outside enemy’ must be dispelled. "Propaganda purports not only to drown the truth but also to ‘kill the evidence’ on how this ‘outside enemy’, namely Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda was fabricated and transformed into ‘Enemy Number One’. The entire National Security doctrine centers on the existence of an ‘outside enemy’ which is threatening the Homeland." It has been clear for months that the scandal-ridden Bush administration, collapsing under the weight of its own criminality, and plummeting public confidence and political support, is desperate to manufacture the appearance of progress, even triumph, in its waning months. In order to portray themselves as the Homeland’s premier "anti-terrorist" saviors, Bush and his functionaries must now attempt to sell their ability to solve to bogus problem with "terror" arrests and foiled plots, which have recently included the capture and execution of certain key Al-Qaeda" figures. The official "Al-Qaeda" narrative itself is being given a makeover. "Al-Qaeda", "on the move", is being implanted into the Anglo-American empire’s new hot spots, the new targets of Western military-intelligence intervention, such as Iraq, Irbil (near Iran), Somalia and even Gaza. In addition, with America’s Middle East war agenda derailing under Bush-Cheney management, new bipartisan political desperation to "restore order", shared by neocons and neoliberals alike, is resulting in a push towards a new and even more dangerous phase of the "war on terrorism", and an increased potential for new manufactured crises and "new 9/11s". It is no surprise that most if not all of the so-called Democratic congressional opposition to the Bush administration uniformly embraces the "war on terrorism". In fact, evidenced by recent debates between Democratic presidential candidates (Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Barack Obama, etc.), the Democrats advocate aggressive Homeland Security and renewed ("even better") "security" policies and improved ways to "kill terrorists", expand Bush’s world war, and militarily intervene in new areas of "national security" interest. Far from being genuine opponents of the Bush-Cheney agenda, the Democrats are fully complicit. Gullible, paranoid and violent US citizenry Lurid news coverage of the Fort Dix plot, the Virginia Tech massacre, and "war on terrorism" and a steady diet of "anti-terror" entertainment such as the television series 24, continue to spark panic and constant fear of "terrorism threats" among US citizens. Reaction to the Fort Dix incident among the acquiescent and complacent populace has been uniformly paranoid, marked by saber-rattling and war-mongering. Some portions of the United States have been reverted quickly to the immediate post-9/11 mindset. A fear-struck populace is easily led. The real threat remains the same What the world must continue to take seriously is not a threatened strike by "terrorists", but the violent desperation of a stumbling New World Order that 1) compounds its criminal despair by continuing to commit terrorism and "run" terror groups to achieve its political purposes (the foremost being energy and resource conquest), 2) engage in terroristic provocations (foment backlash, or "blowback"), 3) wittingly and unwittingly creates new insurgencies and opposition from victimized populaces and occupied nations. As it was on the morning of 9/11, all eyes must remain locked on the guilty parties in Washington---the political criminals who are "above the law", armed with the power to manipulate, control and exterminate broad sections of humanity, within the US homeland and abroad.

Larry Chin is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by Larry Chin