Re: The Snipers

["Jose G. Perez" <jgperez@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

>Military training links string of serial killers<

I think it is more than the military training, at least narrowly construed
as a set of skills operating various types of weapons or creating them. I
think it is also a question of U.S. military doctrinne, and the American
world outlook, for lack of a better term.

A few weeks ago, I was engaged in a private exchange with Fred Feldman and
Walter Lippmann on this question. It involved some of the Cubans's
statements at the U.N. and some other matters, but also this issue. At the
time we agreed to post the material on this list, but when we tried to pull
it together, it really didn't come neatly into a form that people could
readily understand. But I think perhaps this excerpt from an email I wrote
them during that exchange may stimulate some thinking around the issue of
U.S. military doctrinne as such, and how it fits into the
ultra-individualistic imperialist ideology of the U.S. For I think there we
will find many elements useful in understanding the sniper, where he came
from, what he represents.

What follows, however, was all written before the sniper case emerged.

*  *  *

I, for one, do not view al Qaida as in any sense part of the world 's
progressive or anti-imperialist or anti-capitlalist forces or anything like
that, unlike, for example, the FALN, which, however insane its tactics,
clearly grew out of and was part of the Puerto Rican independence movement.

I think Cuba's very harsh and categorical, un-nuanced, condemnation of the
9-11 attack, and its expressions of solidarity with the victims and offers
to help in whatever way it could, is right on the money. And I think *this*
condemnation is of a qualitatively different character than their criticisms
and even repudiation of the mistaken tactics of some fighters in Latin
America. Clearly, for example, in their work around the five patriots in
American jails, they seek to identify with "antiterrorist" sentiment among
the American people. They have time and again drawn parallels, and
practically placed equals signs, between gusano terrorism and al qaida
terrorism. [see www.antiterroristas.cu]

I think Cuba views al qaida as essentially reactionary, and I think they are
right.

This is not because al Qaida has a reactionary religious ideology (although
it does), but rather because of its sinister nature as a movement whose
nucleus was spawned in the CIA's imperialist crusade against the USSR in
Afghanistan.

Unlike Hamas, it is a movement with no real connection to the Arab masses or
their struggles. Its links to Saudi ruling class families are well know, and
it seems like a good number of its troops come out of bourgeois and
upper-petty-bourgeois circles facing ruin that have been driven to the most
abhorrent kind of irrationality and despair by it.

I ask myself, who can so warp people's minds that they are capable of
conceiving something like taking a plane load of civilians and using it as a
guided missile against buildings which ordinarily contain tens of thousands
of working people, like the twin towers? The answer that immediately comes
to my mind is: the CIA.

CIA spawned anti-Cuba terrorists were the first ones to deliberately blow up
a civilian air liner in midair (Barbados). CIA/US Military trained assassins
were the ones who invented the death flights in Argentina, where thousands
of activists and just regular people who had been "disappeared" by the
military were drugged, bound and dumped into the South  Atlantic so they
would never be found again.

Everywhere in Latin America you find the systematic use of torture and death
squads you find Latin American officers trained in the CIA/US military
School of the Americas.

A recent case in Afghanistan is the massacre of the wedding party. Even
assuming the American generals are telling the truth, and there was
antiaircraft fire from some place in that general area against its planes, I
do not believe any other military would say, AFTER having learned that it
was a civilian village and wedding party, that wiping out the settlement was
the right thing to do and that they would do it again. Yet that most or all
of the targets turned out to be civilians is not relevant in the Pentagon's
view.

I don't mean to suggest that other imperialists would not be capable of
similar savagery, but I do not believe that today others would justify it so
nakedly in a military doctrine which they defend and propound in speeches
and press conferences.

U.S. military doctrine and ideology, unique insofar as I know today, not
only unfailingly produces such crimes but justifies them. It says, in efect,
we did the right thing and would do it again. And American imperialist
commanders and troops are hardened into an attitude that such outcomes are
normal and acceptable and not at all an indication of some sort of mistake.
The thing to be avoided at all costs are situations where an enemy has a
chance to shoot back. If actual combat, in the normal sense of the word,
threatens to break out, US doctrine is to turn tail and call in the B-52's
and gunships to indiscriminately obliterate everything in sight. Even
Israel's IDF does not have a doctrine that so organically intertwines
cowardice and criminality.

The reasons for this doctine are clear. In a country that has made
ultra-individualistic "looking out for number one" its religion, it makes no
sense to ask someone to sacrifice themselves for "the greater good," for
they themselves are the *greatest* good. The ideology of selfish individual
fulfilment achieved through consumerism has no room for self-sacrifice for a
cause.

At any rate, if they're willing to justify massacre as part of routine
military operations, if this is what they're willing to say publicly about
open warfare, what is the military doctrinne of their clandestine services?
Disappearances. Death squads. Death flights Torture. Civilian air liners
blown up in mid-air. Preparation and perfection of ever-more-deadly,
weaponized, chemical and biological agents far "superior" to those of any
other country (like the anthrax used against Congress, which came from
military stocks).

I believe al qaida is profoundly marked by its roots in the vilest
expressions of imperialist inhumanity. This lies at the center of its own
ideology and military doctrine, and in the recent al jazeera documentary,
two of their key leaders say it explicitly: they want to do to the exactly
the same kinds of things to the U.S. as the U.S.does to Iraq, the
Palestinians, etc. I do not believe it is an *accident* Timothy McVeigh, the
Oklahoma City bomber, who was also indoctrinated with the same ideological
outlook in the American armed forces, copied his tactics from Al qaida.

Sorry to have gone on so long about that, but I think it is important that
people understand that Osama and his ilk are an extreme expression of the
decay and decomposition of the imperialist system, not at all a movement
*against* it, however misguided.

*  *  *

    I would add now, for those who doubt there is something quite distinctly
*American* about al Qaida's terrorism, that people should go back and look
at the history of lynching in the United States, and the genocide against
the Indians. There were 20 million native Americans living in what is now
the United States when Columbus got lost on the way to India (Adam, who has
studied this more thoroughly, and more recently than I have, says that
figure is way too low, but never mind). After the last great massacre of the
Indian Wars at Wounded Knee in 1890, the U.S. census counted 100,000 Native
Americans left, one half of one percent or less of those who lived here
originally. As for lynchings, and there were thousands recorded and probably
many more never counted, the thing to focus on is NOT the brutal,
extrajudicial execution, but the county fair, holiday picnic atmosphere that
surrounded so many of them, and the custom of immortalizing them in
postcards you could send to your friends and families.

José

----- Original Message -----
From: "Richard Fidler" <rfidler@xxxxxxxxxx>
To: "Marxism list" <marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, October 25, 2002 2:44 PM
Subject: Re: The Snipers


>> Although the media is falling over itself to link the snipers to the
Nation of Islam, al-Queda, etc., there has been zero effort directed to
making the real link, namely with Timothy McVeigh,.... <<

Here's one effort, in today's Toronto Globe & Mail:

Military training links string of serial killers

By DOUG SAUNDERS
Friday, October 25, 2002 - Print Edition, Page A5



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