ANTIFA INFO-BULLETIN, No. 838
 
Date: Tue, 10 Jul 2007 01:09:40 -0500 (CDT)


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ANTIFA INFO-BULLETIN
News * Analysis * Research * Action
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- AFIB No. 838, July 8, 2007 -

FREE MUMIA ABU-JAMAL! FREE LEONARD PELTIER!
FREE ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS & PRISONERS OF WAR!
END THE OCCUPATIONS!
ISRAEL OUT OF PALESTINE! U.S. OUT OF IRAQ!

Every leading member of al-Qaeda's Finsbury division--Omar Bakri, Abu
Hamza, Abu Qatada--has according to credible reports, a close
relationship to Britain's security services. It is plausible that the
use of these individuals by MI5 and MI6 as intelligence assets, in
some capacity, fundamentally compromised the services' ability to
investigate impartially the terrorist networks surrounding them on the
one hand; and on the other, seriously impeded Scotland Yard's ability
to follow up independent police investigations into their terrorist
activities in a manner fully consistent with the law. ... An
entrenched and growing network of al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorists...has
operated in the UK, with immunity from the law, despite being
implicated in numerous instances of international terrorism. What is
most perturbing about this phenomenon is that it has occurred under
the leadership of a handful of unscrupulous extremist clerics with
links to British security services. -- Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, The
London Bombings: An Independent Inquiry [London: Duckworth, 2006] pp.
175-176.

Contents: Number 838

01. WORLD SOCIALIST WEB SITE [Oak Park, MI]: Faced with the failure of
Bush's "surge": Congressional Republicans, Democrats Prepare Fallback
Iraq War Strategy.
02. NEW SCIENTIST [London]: Plague of Bioweapons Accidents Afflict the U.S.
03. THE CUTTING EDGE [London]: Whose Bombs?
04. EMPIRE BURLESQUE [London]: News Flash: Chemical Weapon Terrorist
Plot Thwarted in UK!

* * *

WORLD SOCIALIST WEB SITE
Published by the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI)
Web: http://www.wsws.org/
E-Mail: editor@wsws.org
- Saturday, 7 July 2007 -

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Faced with the failure of Bush's "surge"
CONGRESSIONAL REPUBLICANS, DEMOCRATS PREPARE FALLBACK IRAQ WAR STRATEGY
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News & Analysis: Middle East: Iraq
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2007/jul2007/iraq-j07.shtml
By Patrick Martin

New Mexico Senator Pete V. Domenici became the latest Senate
Republican to publicly break with the Bush administration and call for
a change in US strategy in Iraq, including a pullback in combat
operations.

Domenici was following in the footsteps of Senator Richard Lugar of
Indiana, the ranking Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee,
who declared the Bush "surge" in Iraq a failure in a speech on the
Senate floor June 25, and Senator George Voinovich of Ohio, who issued
a statement making similar criticisms a day later.

That the influx of nearly 30,000 additional US troops has failed to
stem sectarian warfare or stabilize Baghdad was underscored by press
reports Thursday that the number of unidentified bodies found on the
streets of the capital in June was 41 percent higher than in January,
prior to the launching of the "surge." Meanwhile, US troops suffered
the highest level of fatalities for any three-month period since the
beginning of the war during the period from April through June.

A group of at least five Republican senators has joined with a like
number of Democrats in backing a resolution authored by Ken Salazar, a
Colorado Democrat, and Lamar Alexander, a Tennessee Republican, that
would adopt the recommendations of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group and
make them government policy.

A similar resolution has been introduced by two Democrats and two
Republicans in the House of Representatives, following a House vote
last month to provide $1 million to reestablish the Iraq panel that
was co-chaired by former secretary of state James Baker, a Republican,
and Democratic former congressman Lee Hamilton.

This Senate resolution, which suggests but does not mandate a
withdrawal of combat troops by next spring, has the backing of several
Republicans facing reelection in 2008 from states where antiwar
sentiment is dominant, including John Sununu of New Hampshire and
Susan Collins of Maine. New Hampshire's other Republican senator,
conservative Judd Gregg, is also supporting the resolution, as well as
Robert Bennett of Utah.

With senators like Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and Gordon Smith of Oregon
already having voted for one or another Democratic-sponsored measure
to change the Bush administration's war priorities, that brings to at
least ten the number of Republicans who have publicly broken with the
White House over Iraq policy. As the Los Angeles Times noted, "With
the Senate's 49 Democrats nearly united, the chamber is inching toward
the 60 votes needed to pass a bill to force the president to adopt a
new strategy."

Many more could defect if, as expected, Senator John Warner of
Virginia, the ranking Republican on the Armed Services Committee long
considered the voice of the Pentagon on Capitol Hill, associates
himself with one or another proposal to force a change in the conduct
of the war. Warner praised Lugar's speech and indicated he would make
his own statement when the defense authorization bill comes to the
Senate floor during the week of July 9. The Salazar-Alexander
resolution, now endorsed by Domenici as well, is expected to be
offered as an amendment to that legislation.

There should be no illusions that what is motivating these Republicans
or their Democratic counterparts is any sympathy for the mass antiwar
sentiment of the American people. The congressional leaders and
presidential candidates of both parties regard the growth of antiwar
sentiment with alarm and seek to direct it along politically safe
channels that will not threaten the fundamental interests of the US
ruling elite.

Millions of working people and youth in the United States are
beginning to understand the war in Iraq as a monstrous crime, not a
mistake. They are sickened both by the loss of life among American
troops and the catastrophe which the US invasion has produced for the
Iraqi people. And they recognize that the Bush administration lied
about weapons of mass destruction and Iraqi ties to Al Qaeda in order
to conceal the real motives for the conquest of a country with the
third largest oil reserves in the world.

Senators like Domenici, Lugar and Warner, by contrast--as well as
Democrats such as Harry Reid, Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton--are
deeply concerned that the Iraq war has severely damaged the position
of American imperialism both internationally and at home, and they
seek a new course of action to salvage what can be saved from the
wreckage.

Lugar spelled this out most clearly in his June 25 speech, when he
rebuked the Bush administration for neglecting "our vital interests"
in favor of "an unquestioned devotion to an ill-defined strategy of
'staying the course' in Iraq." He listed four primary objectives:
maintaining access to Persian Gulf oil, preventing Iranian hegemony of
the region, limiting the loss of US credibility worldwide, and the
politically obligatory reference to preventing Iraq from becoming a
base for terrorism.

Lugar warned that continuation of the current course in Iraq could
foreclose the possibility of an orderly redeployment of the US
military in Iraq and result in a panicky retreat that would have
devastating consequences for the authority of the US around the world.
He also pointed to the dangerous domestic political implications of
continuing the current military escalation in the midst of a
presidential election.

On Tuesday, two days before Domenici issued his statement, the Wall
Street Journal published a front-page article reporting that Bush's
secretary of defense, Robert Gates, a member of the Iraq Study Group
before being nominated by Bush to replace ousted Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld, was working to forge a bipartisan political consensus
for a "long-term US presence in Iraq." The article said that Gates
supported a reduction of US combat troops in the country by the end of
Bush's term. The Journal described the strategy being advanced by
Gates as "a more modest attempt to contain the civil war, rather than
the current effort to end the conflict."

The article continued, "A smaller force of American troops, operating
out of large bases far from Iraq's major cities, would focus on
battling Al Qaeda, securing Iraq's borders and training the country's
struggling security forces." This is tantamount to abandoning the
attempt to establish a stable, multi-ethnic government subservient to
the US and allowing the sectarian war fueled by the US invasion and
occupation to rage, while the US military secured control of Iraq's
oil resources and positioned itself to launch attacks on Iran or other
countries in the Middle East considered to be obstacles to US
domination of the region.

At a Thursday news conference in Albuquerque where he announced his
change of position on Iraq, Domenici claimed that it was the product
of conversations with the family members of soldiers from his state
killed in Iraq, combined with an assessment that the Iraqi government
was not able to resolve the political crisis in the country produced
by the US invasion.

"We cannot continue asking our troops to sacrifice indefinitely while
the Iraqi government is not making measurable progress," Domenici
said. "I do not support an immediate withdrawal from Iraq or a
reduction in funding for our troops. But I do support a new strategy
that will move our troops out of combat operations and on the path to
coming home."

These comments echo Democratic criticisms of the US-installed regime
in Baghdad--including, among other things, its failure to adopt
legislation demanded by Washington to privatize the oil industry and
open it up to American corporations. One of the most unsavory aspects
of the congressional "debate" over the war is the effort to place the
blame for the catastrophe on the Iraqis, thus diverting attention from
those with the real responsibility, the war criminals in the White
House and the Pentagon and their accomplices in both parties on
Capitol Hill.

Domenici recounted a discussion with the father of a soldier killed in
Iraq, who told him, "I'm asking you if you couldn't do a little extra,
a little more, to see if you can't get the troops back. Mine is dead,
but I would surely hope that you would listen to me and try to get the
rest of them back sooner."

"That's what I'm beginning to hear," Domenici added. "I heard nothing
like that a couple of years ago. I think that's the result of this war
dragging on almost indefinitely."

This account is obviously self-serving, since there is no indication
from his previous record that Domenici cared more about the three New
Mexico soldiers killed since his last vote to uphold the White House
position on the war than he did about the 28 soldiers from his state
who died in the preceding four years.

Moreover, non of the congressional critics of Bush's war policy, from
either party, has raised the slightest protest against the current
bloodbath being carried out by the US military in towns such as
Baqubah and parts of Baghdad.

But there is little doubt that the bloody consequences of Bush's war
of aggression are having an ever-deeper impact on public consciousness
all over the country. In New Mexico, for instance, nine soldiers have
died since January 1, 2007, a larger death toll in six months than in
any previous full year. This is one measure of the impact of the
"surge" in Iraq on the American people.

The latest CBS News poll reported record levels of popular opposition
both to the war and the Bush administration. On the war, the largest
category of respondents, 40 percent, favored an immediate reduction in
US troops, while Bush's approval rating registered a record low of 27
percent.

Even more alarming for the ruling elite were indications of growing
popular hostility to the entire political set-up in the US, and signs
that opposition to the war was merging with broad social and economic
discontent. The poll found that 75 percent believed the country was
"on the wrong track," the highest figure ever recorded since CBS News
began asking the question decades ago.

This popular pressure has certainly had an effect on Senate
Republicans. A mood verging on panic has emerged in regard to the 2008
election campaign. As right-wing columnist Robert Novak noted this
week, "It is difficult to exaggerate the pessimism about the immediate
political future voiced by Republicans in Congress when not on the
record. With an unpopular president waging an unpopular war, they
foresee electoral catastrophe in 2008, with Democratic gains in both
the House and Senate and Hillary Clinton in the White House."

Domenici has ample reason to be concerned about the growth of popular
hostility to the war. He is facing an increasingly difficult
reelection challenge, despite his status as a five-term senator,
because of antiwar sentiment in New Mexico and his own close links to
some of the more sordid crimes of the Bush administration. Domenici is
the senator most closely linked to the White House purge of US
attorneys, with testimony before congressional committees that he
demanded the ouster of Albuquerque's US attorney, David Iglesias,
because Iglesias declined to bring a politically motivated corruption
case against a Democratic officeholder on the eve of the 2006
election.

Of the eleven Republicans already considered shaky from the standpoint
of the White House, seven--Domenici, Alexander, Warner, Collins,
Smith, Sununu and Hagel--are up for reelection in 2008. An eighth
senator facing reelection next year, Norm Coleman of Minnesota, has
said he will reconsider his position in September, when the Bush
administration delivers its report on the outcome of the "surge."

Although mounting antiwar sentiment is a major driving force of this
political crisis for the ruling elite, the defeat of the Republicans
and the election of a Democratic president and Congress would not
result in an end to either the war in Iraq or to the broader project
of establishing US imperialist domination over the oil-rich regions of
the Middle East and Central Asia.

The Democrats, like the Republicans, are a party of the ruling
financial aristocracy, unshakably committed to the defense of US
imperialist interests. The Democratic-controlled Congress has already
repeatedly refused to use its legislative control over government
finance and policy to force an end to the war, and all the major
Democratic presidential candidates, whatever their tactical
differences with Bush, are committed to maintaining a large-scale US
military presence in Iraq for the foreseeable future.

In the final analysis, the efforts of Domenici, Lugar and their
Democratic counterparts are aimed at achieving a bipartisan agreement
to continue the US occupation of Iraq throughout the remainder of
Bush's term in office and into the next administration, regardless of
the horrific cost in lives and in defiance of the sentiments of the
vast majority of the American people.

Copyright 1998-2007 World Socialist Web Site. All rights reserved.

*****
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PLAGUE OF BIOWEAPONS ACCIDENTS AFFLICTS THE U.S.
_________________________________________________________________________

NEW SCIENTIST
Top Stories
05 July 2007
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12197-plague-of-bioweapons-accidents-afflicts-the-us.html
Debora MacKenzie

Deadly germs may be more likely to be spread due to a biodefence lab
accident than a biological attack by terrorists.

Plague, anthrax, Rocky Mountain spotted fever -- these are among the
bioweapons some experts fear could be used in a germ warfare attack
against the US. But the public has had near-misses with those diseases
and others over the past five years, ironically because of accidents
in labs that were working to defend against bioterrorists. Even worse,
they may be only the tip of an iceberg.

The revelations come from Ed Hammond of the Sunshine Project, a
biosafety pressure group based in Austin, Texas, US, who after
persistent requests got the minutes of university biosafety committees
using the US Freedom of Information Act. The minutes are accessible to
the public by law.

There are now 20,000 people at 400 sites around the US working with
putative bioweapons germs, says Hammond, 10 times more than before the
terrorist attacks of 9/11. Some scientists have warned for years that
more people handling dangerous germs are a recipe for accidents.

Unreported incidents?

The fears have been borne out by publicised infections of lab workers
with tularemia, brucellosis and Q fever.

The Q fever incident took place at Texas A&M University, which has now
been ordered to stop research into potential bioweapons while an
investigation takes place.

However, Hammond's minutes contain further, previously unreported, slip-ups:

* At the University of New Mexico, one worker was jabbed with an
anthrax-laden needle, and another with a syringe containing an
undisclosed, genetically engineered microbe.

* At the Medical University of Ohio, workers were exposed to and
infected with Valley Fever.

* At the University of Chicago, there was another puncture with an
undisclosed agent normally requiring heavy containment, probably
anthrax or plague.

* At the University of California at Berkeley, workers handled deadly
Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, which spreads in the air, without
containment when it was mislabelled as harmless.

* At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and at Albert
Einstein College of Medicine in New York City, workers were exposed to
TB when containment equipment failed.

As yet, none of the accidents have been serious in outcome. But,
Hammond fears, more such accidents may go unreported. "Instead of a
'culture of responsibility', the federal government has instilled a
culture of denial" he says. "Labs hide problems, and think that
accident reporting is for masochists"

Reporting essential

Without stringently enforced reporting rules, he says, labs have every
reason to cover up accidents. They want to avoid losing research
funds, and fear the massive official reaction to any accident -- such
as the imprisonment of plague researcher Thomas Butler in 2003. And he
claims Texas A&M officials have said they now regret reporting the Q
fever incident.

"I think the answer is to create a level playing field by having clear
and absolutely mandatory reporting requirements," says Hammond.
"Eliminate even the possibility of an institution claiming that it
does not have to report infections."

"The labs will say, you can't do that because then people won't report
accidents," says Hammond. "Well, I think it's pretty clear that people
don't report accidents as it stands."

Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

*****
_________________________________________________________________________

WHOSE BOMBS?
_________________________________________________________________________

THE CUTTING EDGE
Deep, critical commentary and analysis exposing the causes and
consequences of the new "War on Terror"
Friday, July 6, 2007
http://nafeez.blogspot.com/
By Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed

[The following is an extended deconstructive analysis quoting rather
liberally from relevant sources. As far as I'm aware, it's the first
of its kind to be published in either mainstream or alternative
circles. Therefore, please circulate widely.]

How to understand the attempted but largely failed terrorist plots
uncovered since last Friday? Police officers on June 29 dismantled two
car bombs made from gas canisters, gasoline and nails, parked in
central London's major theatre and shopping districts. A day later,
two men rammed a Jeep Cherokee, filled with flammable material, into a
terminal entrance at Glasgow airport. The series of attempted attacks
follows hot on the heels of an attempted al-Qaeda attack in the United
States earlier in June.

The chronology requires further probing, and indeed, preliminary
analysis raises some unresolved questions.

Their Terror... And Ours

We will start with the UK. First off, we need to consider the way
government, police and security services dealt with events. On Friday,
official sources immediately told mainstream media that they had
successfully defused highly dangerous explosive devices in the cars.
The general picture disseminated by government spokesmen was that the
bombs could well have killed hundreds of civilians generating a huge
and lethal fireball engulfing the surrounding area.

"Although the two London car bombs were rudimentary, depending on a
lethal mixture of petrol, gas canisters and nails, they could still
have killed hundreds", wrote Nigel Morris in the Independent:

"They were intended to be triggered by calls to mobile phones left in
the cars. Although the bombers rang the phones several times, the
bombs failed to go off. Did the calls fail to create the necessary
detonation? The Glasgow attack appears to have been a failed suicide
bombing. The Jeep Cherokee that smashed into the city's airport was
set alight but the gas canisters inside failed to ignite."

Fortunately, there were no casualties. Unfortunately, elsewhere in the
world, British and American troops were complicit in acts of terrorism
which did result in Afghan and Iraqi civilian casualties far
outweighing in scale and horror what was going on in the UK. Some of
these were flagged up by American journalist Chris Floyd, but largely
ignored in the mainstream media.

More than 100 Afghan civilians were killed in a three-hour NATO
bombing raid on a village in the British-run district Helmand on
Saturday, so reported the Observer citing local officials of the
US-backed Afgan government, capping off a month of bloodshed in which
over 200 Afghan civilians were killed, "a kill ratio far outstripping
that of the violent sectarians of the Taliban", observes Floyd.
Hapless British commanders involved in the operations aren't happy,
noting that new NATO commander, US Gen Dan McNeill's penchant for
massive airpower could be "counterproductive." "Every civilian dead
means five new Taliban" said one British Army officer, noting the
direct connection between their radicalization and our terrorism. But
while UK commanders may have concerns, they have little choice given
the decisions made for them by Bush and now Brown.

Yet the mainstream media has shown no interest whatsoever in our own
terrorism. "Why do these people hate us, why do they want to attack
us?" I was asked repeatedly over the weekend by various media pundits
wanting to know the secret of how angry Muslims become so radicalized
they want to blow themselves and others up. The usual demands for
Muslims the world over to buck up and confront the bin Laden-esque
"enemy within" were trumpeted. Yet there was little soul-searching
about a phenomenon of equal concern -- the creeping radicalization of
Western societies, where the slaughter of hundreds of Afghan or Iraqi
civilians by Anglo-American military forces is justifiable as a form
of "collateral damage", regrettable, but an inevitable corollary of
trying to "smoke 'em out". Sounds disturbingly similar to al-Qaeda's
own rhetoric of justification for targeting our civilians.

But of course, we're the free, civilized world. They're wrong, and we're right.

So let's get quickly back on track to look at the terror attempts in
the UK. Whatever those attacks "appeared" to be, they were clearly
planned and conducted by people with absolutely no real idea of what
they were doing. Despite official attempts to ratchet up the
fear-level by insisting that the police had pre-empted a spectacular
bombing plot that could have slaughtered hundreds, a number of experts
have pointed out the obvious.

Improvised Un-explosive Devices?

Larry C. Johnson, a former senior US counterterrorist official for the
CIA and State Department who works as a consultant to governments on
terrorism issues, described the Friday episode as a "crock of crap":

"...gasoline is not a high explosive. If we were talking 50 pounds of
Semtex or the Al Qaeda standby, TATP, I would be impressed. Those are
real high explosives with a detonation rate in excess of 20,000 feet
per second. Gasoline can explode (just ask former owners of a Ford
Pinto) but it is first and foremost an incediary. If the initial
reports are true, the clown driving the Mercedes was a rank amateur
when it comes to constructing an Improvised Explosive Device aka IED.
Unlike a Hollywood flick the 50 gallons of gas would not have shredded
the Mercedes into lethal chunks of flying shrapnel."

His observations on the next day's Glasgow incident are even more cutting:

"Preliminary, unconfirmed reports indicate a nuclear blast has
occurred at Glasgow's international airport. No one has seen the
mushroom cloud or heard the blast, but something by God is happening
and it must be terrible. There is smoke and fire. In fact, a car is on
fire. It must be Al Qaeda. Only Al Qaeda knows how to set themselves
on fire inside a car. Please. Flee to the hills (leave your doors
unlocked). Oh the humanity!...

"... we need to stop equating their [religious fanatics'] hatred with
actual capability. If today's events at Glasgow prove to be linked to
the two non-events yesterday in London, then we should heave a sigh of
relief. We may be witnessing the implosion of takfiri jihadists --
religious fanatics who are incredibly inept... Propane tanks and
petrol (gas for us Americans) can produce a dandy flame and a mighty
boom but these are not the tools for making a car bomb along the lines
of what we see detonating on a daily basis in Iraq."

As Thomas Greene further observed, absent an oxidiser, the devices, if
one could call them that, would simply have been unable to detonate.
The implication that they could have detonated, then, is precisely
state propaganda. No wonder ex-CIA terror expert Johnson described the
weekend incidents as "non-events." Thus, concluded Peter Lehr, a
research fellow at the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political
Violence, St. Andrews University: "Just using petrol canisters, nuts
and bolts and a cell phone to trigger the explosion, the London
bombing attempt would probably not have worked." He continued about
the Glasgow fiasco: "If you take a look at most al Qaeda attacks, they
did a lot of work on reconnoitring. Now they got stopped by some
bollards. They didn't seem very familiar with the airport, then they
would have known that the bollards would have stopped them or they
overestimated the thrust of the Jeep Cherokee."

For those tracking the recent round of terror plots against the US and
Britain, the dire lack of expertise is a familiar pattern. On the
August 2006 "liquid bomb plot", similarly discredited as simply
unworkable, former British Army intelligence officer Lt. Col. (ret.)
Nigel Wylde pointed out: "Not al-Qaeda for sure. It would not work.
Bin Laden is interested in success not deterrence by failure."

The Propaganda War

Rather than reassuring the public of these facts and implications, the
government did the opposite. The UK terror alert was raised to
"critical", and the citizens were urged to remain "alert" and
"vigilant". "If it moves to critical, you should worry", a senior
Whitehall source told the BBC when asked to explain the alert level
system.

Rachel North, a survivor of the July 7th 2005 London bombings, comments:

"Oh for heaven's sake. We 'should worry'. That's the suggestion is it?
The official advice is: to be afraid and stay afraid? And what pray,
does being told 'to worry' do to help aid the fight against terrorism?
Terrorism being of course designed to worry, nay, terrify and
terrorise people, using terror: the state of being afraid?

"...What is the 'critical -- attack imminent-stuff then, if not
intimidating, and likely to make people anxious and therefore stop
them getting on with their lives? ... like most of the new anti-terror
intitiatives, all it does is sound scary and ramp up the fear without
actually doing anything practical to tackle the situation... We didn't
have this during the IRA campaign or during the Blitz, so I don't see
why turning the adrenalin dial up to eleven is going to help now. We
can all see the news, thank you. We don't need to have our strings
pulled like this."

So we have established that there is, indeed, a sharp disparity
between the reality of these plots as utterly amateur cock-ups by
people with no idea whatsoever of how to actually pull off a terrorist
attack, and the official propaganda from the state that these attacks
could have killed hundreds -- which they simply could not have done.

Perhaps it is cynical to recognize that these doomed-to-fail plots
coincided with the British government's new counter-terrorism
proposals. Days before these incidents, on 27th June, the House of
Commons Home Affairs Committee announced it was planning to hold a
short inquiry into the new proposals for extended anti-terror powers,
originally set out on 7th June by the Home Secretary.

Ironically, the Home Secretary's announcement for new anti-terror
legislation followed hot on the heels of revelations that a purported
spectacular al-Qaeda terrorist plot unearthed in the United States may
well have been nothing more than Bush administration propaganda. Such
was the accusation from Keith Olbermann on MSNBC's Countdown show 'The
Nexus of Politics & Terror', who further noted that this was
consistent with a history of such pronouncements:

"The abstract, hypothetical terror plot at JFK: It sounds ominous
until you ask the experts. Blow up part of the jet fuel pipeline and
you still stand zero chance of blowing up the airport... We will truth
squad the plot and update the 'Nexus of Politics and Terror,' the now
13 times officials in this country have revealed so-called terror
plots at times that were just coincidentally to their political
benefit, no matter how preposterous the actual schemes might have
been, including the plot against Fort Dix where pizza delivery men
were supposed to kill at will at an Army base full of soldiers with
guns."

But perhaps most disturbingly, Olbermann references the extraordinary
public statement by the newly-elected Chairman of the Republican Party
in Arkansas, to the effect that more 9/11's are needed to galvanise
support for the Bush administration. The full statement, made in an
interview with the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette by Chairman Dennis
Milligan, is reported in Raw Story as follows:

"In his first interview as the chairman of the Arkansas Republican
Party, Dennis Milligan told a reporter that America needs to be
attacked by terrorists so that people will appreciate the work that
President Bush has done to protect the country. 'At the end of the
day, I believe fully the president is doing the right thing, and I
think all we need is some attacks on American soil like we had on
[Sept. 11, 2001],' Milligan said to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette,
'and the naysayers will come around very quickly to appreciate not
only the commitment for President Bush, but the sacrifice that has
been made by men and women to protect this country'."

With all due respect: what kind of closet Stalinist thinks that "we
need" another terrorist attack "like" 9/11, in order that popular
dissent might "come around" in favour of Bush and his policies of
domestic and international militarization, mirrored faithfully here in
the UK, originally by Blair, and now it seems by his heir Brown?

To those who have researched the development of neo-conservative
ideology and geopolitical strategies behind the rise of the Bush
administration, this is actually a startlingly familiar sentiment
among elements of the American policymaking establishment. Recall the
exhortations of Bush's home-grown think-tank, the Project for a New
American Century in its September 2000 report "Rebuilding America's
Defenses"; or three years earlier, the carefully-crafted expansionist
geostrategy charted by former National Security Adviser Zbigniew
Brzezinski in his Council on Foreign Relations study, The Grand
Chessboard -- all looking to a spectacular Pearl Harbour-type event as
a useful tool for the control of public opinion at home, and thus the
legitimization of military interventionism abroad.

More closet Stalinists to add to the collection? And some of them are
now in charge of the most powerful state in the world.

Warnings, Warnings

Further questions arise in view of the emerging evidence of several
warnings of the plots received by British and American intelligence
services. Now the existence of these warnings ought to be contrasted
with the official line expressed at the outset, that there was no
intelligence chatter, no prior intelligence, and no specific warning
about what was going to happen. That stance has now been pretty much
discredited.

"Warnings were issued three months ago [in April 2007] about the
threat of a terrorist campaign to mark the end of Tony Blair's
premiership, security sources have revealed". Two major agencies, the
Centre for the Protection of the National Infrastructure, which
reports to MI5, and the National Counter Terrorism Security Office,
which reports to chief police officers "warned in April about the
possibility of a renewed campaign". One senior security source told
the Guardian: "The Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre [JTAC] assessed
that a group of individuals, it is not known how many, clearly had the
capability and the intent to carry out attacks on the UK. Therefore
there was a strong likelihood of further attacks." But officials
insisted that there had been "no specific" information about the
events of Friday and Saturday.

Further details came from the Sunday Times which obtained a leaked
copy of the JTAC assessment. The newspaper cites Patrick Mercer MP,
former homeland security spokesman, asking: "If they had a JTAC
document saying there was a high risk of an attack to mark the end of
the Blair administration, why didn't they raise the threat level and
why weren't people warned?"

An alleged al-Qaeda-Taliban video, shot on 9th June in Pakistan by a
Pakistani journalist invited for the occasion, was aired by CNN and
ABC in that month purportedly displaying a suicide bomber "graduation
ceremony". The video claimed that "suicide bombers were supposedly
sent off on their missions in the United States, Canada, Great Britain
and Germany." The video included

"... images of Taliban military commander Mansoor Dadullah, his
brother was killed last month by US forces. On the tape, the leader of
the British team speaking of the mission in broken English said 'Let
me say something about why we are going along with my team to tell a
suicide attack in Britain.' The video at the time sent a chilling note
across the security services with warnings that attacks in the UK were
more than likely this summer..."

For those with an eye for detail, the connection between our no doubt
utterly justifiable June slaughter of Afghans and this particular
warning from Pakistan of an imminent strike on Britain is notable.
Yes, it is by no means the whole story, but it is undeniably a
significant component. Meanwhile, British officials are falling over
themselves to insist that there is no discernable connection to
Pakistan -- of course our ardent ally in the 'War on Terror'. Also
worth noting is, as the report above continues, the perpetrators of
these particular attacks: foreign "trainee doctors are being held as
suspects, having passed their security checks and been provided with
official approval to practice in the UK."

Dirty Skins

They were not clean skins, police officials are happy to admit, noting
that MI5 had logged several of them in its surveillance database of
"desirable" targets, thus allowing them to be quickly identified and
apprehended. What a resounding success. "Several doctors arrested over
the London and Glasgow car bomb plot were on the files of MI5",
reported the Telegraph, including one

"... on a Home Office watch list after being identified by security
services -- meaning their travel in and out of Britain was monitored
by immigration officers. Others were found to be on the MI5 database,
which contains an estimated 2,000 suspected jihadists or supporters of
terrorism. Whitehall sources said they had not been involved in
previous plots, but were 'people who knew people' who were under
observation... But British security sources insisted there was no
intelligence that al-Qa'eda commanders plotted to infiltrate the
NHS... Most of the alleged cell members arrived in this country after
2004 to take up NHS jobs."

Desirable targets are individuals directly associated with known
al-Qaeda operatives actively engaged in terrorist activity, and/or
those involved in fundraising for terrorist activity. But there are
slight problems here. For one thing, "American intelligence sources
suggested yesterday that some cell members were recruited by al-Qa'eda
in Iraq up to three years ago. Abu Hamza al-Muhajir, an insurgency
leader, was said to have been ordered to find young men to blend into
Western society before staging an attack."

So the Americans knew about them. What about the British? In fact, who
exactly were these doctors associated with? The Americans had more to
tell. The Telegraph noted that:

"... reports from the US that the three men had been identified and
known to be an associate of Dhiren Barot [convicted last year of a
transatlantic terror plan involving nightclubs, car bombs, and other
plots], a suspected terrorist who had planned to set off bombs across
London, were dismissed by government officials."

British officials are denying what the Americans are confirming. But
the Americans do not merely share all their intelligence with the
British as a matter of routine; their intelligence operations are
fundamentally inter-coordinated, and have been increasingly so after
9/11. There are more problems. How on earth did foreign trainee
doctors logged by MI5 as al-Qaeda associates manage to pass "their
security checks" to receive "official approval to practice in the UK"?
MI5 already had these individuals logged, yet MI5 did nothing while
these individuals predictably applied to join the NHS, the very reason
they had arrived in the UK after 2004. The official insistence from
British officials that they had no idea these people were trying to
infiltrate the NHS is difficult to make sense of. What else would
al-Qaeda associates with medical degrees arriving in the UK for the
specific purpose of joining the NHS be trying to do?.

[Just on a side note, the 7/7 bombers (at least Mohammed Sidique Khan
and Shahzad Tanweer), it has been admitted, were also logged by MI5 as
"desirable" targets. Note how in this case police were happy to admit
that the MI5 information was specific enough to quickly identify and
track the alleged suspects. The 7/7 bombers will have been, similarly,
identified along with other relevant background data, as al-Qaeda
associates, at the very least. They will have had files open on them,
just as with these "desirable" targets.]

And More Warnings

More embarrassing information from the Americans has continued to
appear. A senior US official told ABC News that they had "received
intelligence reports two weeks ago which warned of a possible terror
attack in Glasgow against 'airport infrastructure or aircraft'..."
This was actionable intelligence, as it did indeed lead to action:
except not in Glasgow. The official confirmed that "the intelligence
led to the assignment of Federal Air Marshals to flights into and out
of both Glasgow and Prague in the Czech Republic." What did Britain
know? "US Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff declined to
comment on the report, but on Monday told ABC News that 'everything
that we get is shared virtually instantaneously with our counterparts
in Britain and vice versa'."

It should not surprise anyone by now that the Brits are once again
denying everything. "There was no prior intelligence" about the
Glasgow attack, said Strathclyde police chief constable Willie Rae. No
of course there wasn't. American intelligence officials are no doubt
hallucinating.

Yet another official Foreign Office denial came regarding a separate
warning from British priest Canon Andrew White, head of the
Baghdad-based head of the Foundation for Relief and Reconciliation in
the Middle East, who said he'd been warned by an al-Qaeda figure of an
attack. The unnamed al-Qaeda leader from Syria told him on the
sidelines of a religious summit in the Jordania capital, Amman "about
how they were going to destroy British and Americans. He told me that
the plans were already made and they would soon be destroying the
British. He said the people who cure you would kill you." The figure
added that the plans "would be carried out in the coming weeks, and
would target the British first."

"Canon Andrew White, a British cleric working in Baghdad, claimed that
he met an al-Qa'ida leader in Amman who had warned him about the
imminent attack, saying 'those who cure you will kill you'. Canon
White said he passed the message to the Foreign Office. However a
Foreign Office spokesman said there is no record of such a warning
being given."

In any case, White points out that he did not mention the medical
angle. But it looks like the Foreign Office has got itself into a bit
of a tiz. Although issuing repeated denials to various foreign press,
insisting that no record of the warning existed and that no
recollection of the conversation could be unearthed, Bloomberg was
able to report an admission:

"The Foreign Office today acknowledged receiving information from
White about the Amman meeting, adding that it was considered at the
time to be too vague to merit further analysis. White's information
has since been passed on to police investigating the Glasgow and
London incidents, a Foreign Office spokesman said."

Ah yes, too vague, although it cohered with all the other intelligence
of plans to strike the UK being received just around that time. It
certainly also cohered with the previous evidence of an origin for the
attacks in al-Qaeda in Iraq; as well as in Pakistan.

The official British government position is not tenable. Credible
sources confirm that multiple warnings were indeed received. Repeated
official denials contradict the evidence and are
internally-inconsistent. In this context, the response of the
authorities is telling. The denials eclipse the connections of this
obviously untrained group of amateurs to an international
al-Qaeda-affiliated network in Iraq and Pakistan.

Al-Qaeda or Not? And the Strategy of Tension

The "al-Qaeda or not" question, however, is not a black or white case.
The pattern of terror plots particularly in the UK over the last few
years since after 7/7 has invariably involved rather inept cells with
quite questionable expertise in explosives and other terrorist
techniques. Many of these cells while purportedly 'home-grown', are
nevertheless associated with international networks in Pakistan,
Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere, where reside senior al-Qaeda
operatives with real terrorist expertise. In the UK, USA and Western
Europe, one group responsible for mediating communication and movement
between these two domestic and international arenas is formerly known
as al-Muhajiroun, purportedly banned by the British government, but
still intact and still run by self-described cleric Omar Bakri
Mohammed from Lebanon, where he was exiled by the British government.
It is this that appears to produce a mismatch of actual expertise.

Omar Bakri's protege, Anjem Choudray, continues to run around the UK
on Omar Bakri's behalf (and with his regular guidance) attempting to
mentor a new generation of Islamist extremists. It was former Justice
Department prosecutor John Loftus who confirmed that Omar Bakri and
his al-Muhajiroun network had been first hired by MI6 in the late
1990s to recruit British Muslims to fight in Kosovo. His UK underlings
even continue to maintain a website for him which curiously remains
devoid of his hundreds of most inflammatory statements supporting
al-Qaeda terrorism. Despite exiling him to Lebanon, authorities have
done nothing to curb his ongoing influence over his UK network, except
to protect him from official investigation in connection with the
radicalization of that very network. Al-Muhajiroun incubated those
involved with Dhiren Barot's grand plan to bomb targets in the US and
Britain, with which the fertilizer and 7/7 plotters were also
intimately linked.

Further questions arise when we probe the plausible al-Qaeda
connections to these incidents from Iraq and Pakistan. We may remind
ourselves that the alleged perpetrators of the latest crimes are
mostly of Middle Eastern origin. In September 2005, I had already
documented evidence from a number of credible sources suggesting that
the United States was covertly supplying arms to Iraqi insurgents
described as "former Ba'ath party" loyalists now joining with
"al-Qaeda in Iraq". The proxy for this funnel of weaponry was
Pakistani military intelligence, according to a Pakistani defence
source cited by the Asia Times. The next year, an outraged British
colonel complained that Pakistan was sheltering al-Qaeda and the
Taliban. But nevermind him, Bush says Pakistan's our "major non-NATO
ally", and the British government officially agrees.

This strategy of tension in Iraq was, it appears, extended to other
key states in the region, namely Lebanon, by late 2006. On CNN,
Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh
summarized his latest exclusive. Hersh's critical discovery was that
the Bush administration is actively sponsoring al-Qaeda affiliated
groups across the entire Middle East, with a focus on Lebanon, to
counter regional Shi'ite Iranian influence. Moreover, much of the
finances for these covert operations are being funnelled by Saudi
Arabia through Iraq:

"This administration has made a policy change, a decision that they
are going to put all of the pressure they can on the Shiites, that is
the Shiite regime in Iran, the Shiite -- and they are also doing
everything they can to stop Hezbollah -- which is Shiite, the
Hezbollah organization from getting any control or any more of a
political foothold in Lebanon.

"... we are interested in recreating what is happening in Iraq in
Lebanon, that is Sunni versus Shia... we have been pumping money, a
great deal of money, without congressional authority, without any
congressional oversight, Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia is putting up
some of this money, for covert operations in many areas of the Middle
East where we think that the -- we want to stop the Shiite spread or
the Shiite influence.

"They call it the 'Shiite Crescent.' And a lot of this money... has
gotten into the hands -- among other places, in Lebanon, into the
hands of three -- at least three jihadist groups. There are three
Sunni jihadist groups whose main claim to fame inside Lebanon right
now is that they are very tough. These are people connected to al
Qaeda who want to take on Hezbollah...

"My government, which arrests al Qaeda every place it can find them...
is sitting back while the Lebanese government we support, the
government of Prime Minister Siniora, is providing arms and sustenance
to three jihadist groups whose sole function, seems to me and to the
people that talk to me in our government, to be there in case there is
a real shoot-'em-up with Hezbollah...

"... So America, my country, without telling Congress, using funds not
appropriated, I don't know where, by my sources believe much of the
money obviously came from Iraq where there is all kinds of piles of
loose money, pools of cash that could be used for covert operations...
We are simply in a situation where this president is really taking his
notion of executive privilege to the absolute limit here, running
covert operations, using money that was not authorized by Congress,
supporting groups indirectly that are involved with the same people
that did 9/11, and we should be arresting these people rather than
looking the other way..."

Deja vu? An unholy triangle, the US at the helm, Saudi Arabia
providing the funds, Pakistan providing military intelligence support,
but this time not into Afghanistan as during the Cold War, but into
Iraq and thereby throughout the Middle East. It seems, al-Qaeda is
still a useful mercenary outfit for our covert regional geostrategy,
except yet again the theatre of war has shifted.

In March 2007, Hersh firmed up this conclusion in the New Yorker
magazine, citing White House insiders and other US government
officials, all confirming in perhaps the clearest terms that the US
was deliberately attempting to control al-Qaeda terrorist activity
through Saudi Arabia (among others) to be re-directed against Iran:

"The 'redirection,' as some inside the White House have called the new
strategy, has brought the United States closer to an open
confrontation with Iran and, in parts of the region, propelled it into
a widening sectarian conflict between Shiite and Sunni Muslims.

"To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush
Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities
in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has cooperated with
Saudi Arabia's government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations
that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is
backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations
aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has
been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant
vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al
Qaeda.

"... The clandestine operations have been kept secret, in some cases,
by leaving the execution or the funding to the Saudis, or by finding
other ways to work around the normal congressional appropriations
process, current and former officials close to the Administration
said.

"... Flynt Leverett, a former Bush Administration National Security
Council official, told me that 'there is nothing coincidental or
ironic' about the new strategy with regard to Iraq. 'The
Administration is trying to make a case that Iran is more dangerous
and more provocative than the [al-Qaeda] Sunni insurgents to American
interests in Iraq, when--if you look at the actual casualty
numbers--the punishment inflicted on America by the Sunnis is greater
by an order of magnitude,' Leverett said. 'This is all part of the
campaign of provocative steps to increase the pressure on Iran. The
idea is that at some point the Iranians will respond and then the
Administration will have an open door to strike at them.'

"... This time, the U.S. government consultant told me, Bandar and
other Saudis have assured the White House that 'they will keep a very
close eye on the religious fundamentalists.' Their message to us was
'We've created this movement, and we can control it.' It's not that we
don't want the Salafis to throw bombs; it's who they throw them
at--Hezbollah, Moqtada al-Sadr, Iran, and at the Syrians, if they
continue to work with Hezbollah and Iran'."

So, we know the al-Qaeda salafis will throw bombs. But apart from
trying to blow up American, British and other civilians (and perhaps
themselves if they've got that vibe), funnelling them arms, funds and
logistical assistance will allow us to "control" them sufficiently to
make life difficult for the Iranians (or even the Palestinians),
perhaps even provoke them into a response that will legitimize an
Anglo-American "strike at them." Notice that national security, I mean
real national security in terms of the protection of the lives of the
Western publics, is not an operative factor calculated into this
strategy.

Whose bombs indeed. There is a term for this kind of covert
sponsorship of terror networks. It's called "complicity," if the
Modern Law Review is anything to go by. Thus, by law, the Bush
administration, and perhaps now Brown's also, is aiding and abetting
al-Qaeda. They cannot be absolved of culpability in the fall-out.

So why Iran and why now?

Nothing to do with oil, of course. It is merely a coincidence that in
late June, a former White House energy consultant and NATO energy
delegate Dr. Roger Bezdek, annoyed the Bush administration by
demanding that it "must immediately and rigorously assess the looming
impact of peak oil." He said: "... it may already be too late to avoid
serious problems." Dr. Bezdek's warning came shortly after the
publication of British Petroleum's influential Statistical Review of
World Energy which claimed optimistically that sufficient oil reserves
remain to meet current demand for the next 40 years.

BP's report, which echoes that of other American and British giant oil
corporations, was refuted by leading independent oil industry experts
including Dr Colin Campbell, a former chief geologist and
vice-chairman at several major oil companies, who noted that on the
contrary, the latest data shows oil is set to peak within the next
four years. Indeed, Chris Skrebowski, a former chief planner for BP
and now editor of Petroleum Review, observes: "I was extremely
sceptical to start with. We have enough capacity coming online for the
next two-and-a-half years. After that the situation deteriorates."

Bush administration officials have long been aware of the impending
oil crisis. Indeed, it was a key factor in Vice-President Dick
Cheney's formulation of the strategy in Iraq only five months prior to
9/11. Reports like that of BP are designed to misinform, steering
public attention away from the real cause of the problem.

If ever there was a resource-driven strategy of tension, this is it;
and the fear being ratcheted up in the US and UK is its direct
corollary. While the British police and intelligence services are
congratulating themselves on having rounded up the terrorists and thus
quelled the threat for now, the US government is actively fostering
the source of the threat in the Middle East because of its antipathy
toward Iran. Given Britain's close alliance with the US in the 'War on
Terror', the question must be asked, how precisely involved is the
British government in this self-defeating strategy that consciously
compromises civilian life?

You want to fight the terror Mr Brown? Perhaps you can start by
fighting your new boss, Mr Bush.

Somehow, I don't see it happening.

Postscript

If you've read this far and found this article at least nominally
useful, then you'll be interested to take a look at the new website
for our think-tank, the Institute for Policy Research & Development,
http://www.globalcrisis.org.uk. Check it out and spread the word.

Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed is the author of The London Bombings: An
Independent Inquiry (www.independentinquiry.co.uk) and The War on
Truth: 9/11, Disinformation and the Anatomy of Terrorism (Arris, Olive
Branch, 2005).

Copyright 2007 Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed

*****
_________________________________________________________________________

NEWS FLASH: CHEMICAL WEAPON TERRORIST PLOT THWARTED IN THE UK!
_________________________________________________________________________

EMPIRE BURLESQUE
'High Crimes and Low Comedy in the Bush Imperium'
Thursday, 05 July 2007
http://www.chris-floyd.com/Articles/Articles/News_Flash%3A_Chemical_Weapon_Terrorist_Plot_Thwarted_in_the_UK!/
Written by Chris Floyd

British authorities thwarted a plot by UK-born extremists -- including
a medical professional -- to manufacture chemical bombs to be used in
fomenting a "civil war" between Muslims and Christians in the UK, the
Guardian reports, and the alleged perpetrators are now on trial.

But why are we telling you this? Surely, it's been splashed 24-7
across CNN and Fox News. You have doubtless seen every detail of the
conspiracy and its nefarious plotters ricocheting around ABC, NBC and
CBS. You have probably already devoured mountains of newsprint about
the story served up by the New York Times, the Washington Post, AP and
Reuters. And you have certainly been pixelated with thunderous on-line
commentary from PowerLine, Drudge, Instapundit, Malkin, etc., about
this sinister attempt to destroy our Western way of life and impose an
alien ideology on a free people by force.

I mean, it's not every day that you have a dramatic court session
about a WMD plot by white neo-Nazis -- what? You mean you haven't
heard about it? It wasn't on CNN? Glenn Beck wasn't raging about it?
Michelle hasn't jumped all over it like a duck on a june bug? George
Bush hasn't cited it as yet another reason to keep waging the "War on
Terror" in Iraq? But how can that be? I mean, look what we've got
here: Chemical weapons. Violent extremists. Healers unmasked as
haters. Devotees of Hitler, for God's sake! (And we're talking the
real Hitler here, not all those "new Hitlers" who pop up every time
the Pentagon wants to go for an outing). Why isn't news of this plot
-- whose alleged perpetrators have now been brought to open court --
saturating the media, which is normally so ravenous for scaremongering
terrorist copy? Could it be because the alleged plotters are good
old-fashioned Anglo-Saxons, just like mother used to make?

Robert Cottage, 49, a member of the British National Party, is
standing trial in Manchester for amassing material for chemical bombs
-- and instructions for making them -- in his home. The prosecution
said Cottage was acting on the instructions of a fellow BNP cadre,
David Jackson, a respectable 62-year-old dentist from Lancashire.
Cottage's 29-year-old wife testified against him, having originally
reported his alleged plans to test chemical bombs to a social worker
-- the tip that led to the men's arrest.

Cottage had been an unsuccessful BNP candidate for his local town
council -- although many of his culture-war comrades have won seats in
local governments throughout England. His failures didn't damage his
stature in the party, however; indeed, his wife said Cottage had risen
through the ranks to become friends with the party's leader, the
Cambridge-educated Nick Griffin. (Griffin of Cambridge; Bush of Yale
and Harvard: poster boys for the virtues of elitist education.)

Cottage and Jackson found common cause in their enthusiasm for the
carefully muffled racism of the BNP, which has repackaged itself as
the voice of the neglected working class -- an opening given to them
by the Labour Party's cynical abandonment of working people in favor
of corporate tycoons and private equity barons (the UK version of the
DLC strategy, in other words). The BNP thus preys on genuine
grievances in England's equivalent of the "rust belt," and has gained
small footholds across the country, even in London. But while the
media-savvy Griffin soft-pedals the party's core racism for public
consumption, the insiders know the real score. As Mrs. Cottage
testified, her husband and Jackson were "'solid friends who met
regularly to chat about politics, the BNP and Hitler," the Guardian
reports.

The two allegedly planned the chemical bomb attacks as part of a "war
between the Asian culture and the White culture," Mrs. Cottage
testified. In the UK, "Asian" is used to denote those of Pakistani
origin -- overwhelmingly Muslim -- and by extension most other Muslims
of less-than-alabaster hue.

In private talks to party members, Griffin tells his followers that
the BNP is "just one crisis away from power." (Obviously, a few
chemical bombs aimed at fomenting race war might provoke a useful
crisis.) And in fact, for all its pretensions at electorally
representing the plight of neglected workers, the BNP is not really
interested in politics or governance at all. Like some other rightwing
parties we could mention, their only concern is grabbing power and
imposing the views of their tiny, radical base on the nation as a
whole.

Griffin himself spelled it out during a fundraising tour in the United
States, as the Guardian reported last year. (The BNP gets a good deal
of money from fellow travellers in the States -- secret slush funneled
through a front organization, as there are strict limits on British
parties raising money overseas.) The Guardian's Ian Cobain, who went
undercover as a BNP activist for several months, heard a revealing
tape of Griffin speaking in New Orleans -- homeground of his American
doppelganger, David Duke:

"Then I heard a recording of a speech Nick Griffin gave to a closed
conference of white supremacists in New Orleans last year. In it he
spelled out the party's strategy -- and made clear that winning votes
is not an end in itself.

"After his almost-casual denigration of British Muslims -- 'the most
appalling, insufferable people to have to live with' -- Griffin
revealed his belief that a period of prolonged recession was certain
to engulf the developed world as a result of fuel shortages and global
warming. This, he said, would happen soon but it would not be a
disaster, rather "a once-in-200-years opportunity".

"Far-right parties needed to prepare for this moment of crisis by
ensuring that enough people were aware of their policies and had
discovered that they were 'not crazy-eyed lunatics', he said. If
people had considered voting for the BNP, he argued, they would be
more likely to turn to the party during a time of immense crisis.

"'It will be the beginning of an age of scarcity, an age in which a
well-organised nationalist party could really make an impact. And
that's the key word -- organised. In Britain, we are almost there: we
have got this solid 5% block [of support]. Other radical movements in
the past, far left or far right, whatever, a couple of years before a
crisis have had far less than 5%, so as far as I am concerned, that is
fairly satisfactory.'"

"So there it is: the BNP's leaders believe that the time will soon
come when power will fall into the street, and at that moment, with
significant sections of Britain's white population cheering them on,
they will be able to scoop it up.

"While 5% support is a good starting point, Griffin told his audience,
the Front National [of Jean-Marie Le Pen] has an 18%-strong block of
support, and almost half the white voters in France had voted for the
party at some time. If the BNP was to enjoy that level of support, it
would not be consigned to the political margins for much longer. It
would, Griffin said, be just 'one crisis away from power'."

Now here we have a duly accredited political party -- its members
sitting in local governments, its leader a Holocaust denier far more
vehement and total than, say, the president of Iran -- with its
activists on trial for allegedly conspiring to use chemical bombs as
part of a "culture war" to plunge society into crisis and take power.
As such plots go, this one is far more credible than the "liquid
explosive" scare last year that threw the entire global air travel
system into panic and disarray. You'd think it might rate at least a
mention somewhere in the terror-haunted house of horrors that is the
American media. But it raised nary a blip.

Of course, it's only natural that the recent Glasgow-London car-bomb
incidents have drawn more headlines than the BNP chemical bomb trial.
After all, those car bombs actually got built -- albeit in such a
slapdash fashion that they were scarcely workable -- while the alleged
BNP bombs were still in the planning stages. But the disparity in
coverage between "Muslim" terrorism and "Christian" terrorism is
remarkable (as Dave Neiwert continually notes at Orcinus,
http://dneiwert.blogspot.com). Yet a bomb launched by a white
Christian is every bit as deadly as one set off by a swarthy Muslim;
just ask the tens of thousands of Iraqis buried under George Bush's
bombs -- or indeed the people of Britain, where white Christians
incensed about Northern Ireland have claimed far more victims,
including a member of the royal family, than "Asian" Muslims ever
have.

Copyright 2007 Chris Floyd

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