The terrorist attack in Manchester where 22 people, including children, were killed and scores were injured, many critically, provoked an understandable sense of outrage into how and why this could happen. The answer to that question unfortunately has been to repeat the half-truths and stereotypes that have followed each of the terrorist attacks in western cities in recent years.
The fact that all of these terror attacks follow a familiar pattern is not of itself subject to examination, other than at the most superficial level, for example, being perpetrated by “Muslim extremists.”
We were first told that Salman Abedi was unremarkable 22 year old, the child of refugees from Gadhafi’s Libya, who was born in the UK and somehow, inexplicably, turned himself into a terrorist bomber.
More facts have gradually emerged, although the mainstream media have shown a marked reluctance to follow through the threads that have been exposed. Far from being “unremarkable”, Abedi was in fact “known to the intelligence services,” a phrase that recurs after virtually every terrorist attack, whether in London, Brussels, Berlin, Nice and elsewhere. In each and every case, these terrorists “known to the intelligence services” manage to avoid detection prior to them carrying out their attacks, despite, as was the case with Abedi, multiple warning signs.
It is theoretically possible that the intelligence services of all the western countries are so incompetent that they do not manage to intercept a single terrorist attack. A much darker alternative is more likely, that in fact they are allowed to proceed because their actions serve much larger geopolitical goals.
Support for this hypothesis is strengthened when one looks at Abedi’s actual history, as opposed to the sanitized version presented by the mainstream media. Abedi lived in the Whalley Range area of Manchester, which was a centre of activity in the UK for members of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Force (LIFG), which included Abedi’s own father. Despite being a proscribed organisation in the UK, LIFG was allowed to operate freely. Abedi, as well as other members of LIFG were able to move freely between the UK and Libya on a number of occasions.
Abedi is known to have received terrorist training in Libya and is also thought to have spent time in Syria fighting on behalf of the anti-government forces in that country.
In 2011 when NATO forces attacked Libya and overthrew the government of Gadhafi, among a number of the people they put in power was Abdel Hakim Bel-Haj, a leader of the LIFG, later known as the Libyan Islamic Movement for Change (LIMC). Prior to the overthrow of the Gadhafi government and prior to the passage of UN Security Council Resolution 1973, the ostensible justification for the attack, former UK Special Forces were active in Libya providing training for LIFG terrorist groups.
The LIFG was a direct descendant of the al Qaeda terrorist group formed in Pakistan in the late 1970s to subvert the nationalist and relatively secular government of Afghanistan. Under the code name Operation Cyclone terrorist forces were not only infiltrated into Afghanistan, but also beyond into the Muslim dominant Central Asian republics of the then Soviet Union and China’s similarly Muslim region of Xinjiang in that country’s south west.
Contrary to the mythology of the western media at the time, these Mujihideen were not a response to the Soviet “invasion” of Afghanistan in 1979, but as we now know from books published by the two main architects of the plan, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Robert Gates, were actually began several months prior to the entry of Soviet troops into Afghanistan.
The second overriding element in the pattern is that countries targeted by the United States for regime change in the Middle East and elsewhere were all countries whose leadership was insufficiently compliant with US geopolitical wishes, or worse, showed dangerous signs of independence.
After Afghanistan in 2001 (a refusal to grant pipeline access to US oil companies shipping Caspian gas to the Arabian Sea), Iraq followed in 2003. Saddam’s “crime” was a refusal to grant concessions to US oil companies; a decision to trade its oil in Euros rather than exclusively in US dollars; and the misfortune to be on the Israeli Yinon hit list destined for break up into smaller statelets too weak to challenge Israel.
Libya in 2011 followed a similar pattern with the decision by Gadhafi to move Libya’s oil trading out of US dollars and into a gold backed African dinar.
Syria’s “crime” was also in 2011 to refuse the granting of transit rights for the shipment of Qatari gas to Europe, which was intended by the Americans to be the vehicle for undermining European reliance upon Russian natural gas.
In each case there was a massive propaganda campaign in the western media that preceded the invasion and occupation. In Afghanistan it was the refusal of the Taliban government to hand over Osama bin Laden, a long time CIA asset and the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington. Involvement in those attacks was something bin Laden consistently denied, unlike today’s ISIS terrorists who claim responsibility for each and every terrorist atrocity whether they are involved or not.
Iraq had the infamous ‘weapons of mass destruction,’ both Gadhafi and Assad were alleged to be “massacring their own people”. That none of these allegations had a shred of credible evidence to support them was a matter of supreme indifference to political leaders in the US, UK and elsewhere. They always have a feeble post-facto justification for their actions.
Unlike the Tokyo and Nuremburg Tribunals that held political leaders of Germany and Japan responsible for waging a war of aggression, the “supreme international crime” today’s political leaders are seemingly immune from accountability for mass murder and the destruction of whole societies.
A third common theme emerging in mainstream accounts of the Manchester atrocity is that this and other attacks are a form of ‘blowback’, a theory developed many years ago by the late Chalmers Johnson in his book of the same name (2004).
This theory has a superficial attractiveness. It would be understandable that countries that enjoyed stability and a relatively high standard of living, and a marked absence of terrorist activity, would be resentful of the destruction of their societies and the theft of their resources. There will always be individuals seeking retaliation in some form. Creating a bomb in one’s garden shed, driving a truck at civilians on a crowded street or simply running amok with a knife are all relatively low cost and brutally effective means of creating mayhem, at least for a limited time in a limited space.
The problem with blowback as an explanatory mechanism is that it almost completely ignores the role of the State as the primary perpetrator of mass violence. To use just one example to illustrate the point. Craig Murray (www.craigmurray.org.uk 27 May 2017) has done just one calculation. Using the lowest possible estimates, he shows that the number of children killed in the Manchester blast have been killed in Iraq every day for the past eight years.
They are in turn only a small fraction of the civilian casualties in the numerous wars that the western powers have waged over the past seventy years.…..More Here