[Origininaly posted May 14, 2012 at http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2012/05/14/the-case-of-the-missing-terrorists/]
by Paul Craig Roberts
If there were any real terrorists, Jose Rodriguez would be dead.
Who is Jose Rodriguez? He is the criminal who ran the CIA torture
program. Most of his victims were not terrorists or even insurgents.
Most were hapless individuals kidnapped by warlords and sold to the
Americans as “terrorists” for the bounty paid.
If Rodriguez’s identity was previously a secret, it is no more. He
has been on CBS “60 Minutes” taking credit for torturing Muslims and
using the information allegedly gained to kill leaders of al Qaeda. If
terrorists were really the problem that Homeland Security, the FBI and
CIA claim, Rodriguez’s name would be a struck through item on the
terrorists’ hit list. He would be in his grave.
So, also, would be John Yoo, who wrote the Justice (sic) Department
memos giving the green light to torture, despite US and International
laws prohibiting torture. Apparently, Yoo, a professor at the Boalt
School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, was ignorant of
US and international law. And so was the US Department of Justice
(sic).
Notice that Rodriguez, “The Torturer of the Muslims,” doesn’t have to
hide. He can go on national television, reveal his identity, and revel
in his success in torturing and murdering Muslims. Rodriguez has no
Secret Service protection and would be an easy mark for assassination by
terrorists so capable as to have, allegedly, pulled off 9/11.
Another easy mark for assassination would be former Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who staffed up the Pentagon with
neoconservative warmongers such as Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, who
in turn concocted the false information used to justify the invasions
of Iraq and Afghanistan. Rumsfeld himself declared members of al Qaeda
to be the most vicious and dangerous killers on earth. Yet Rumsfeld,
Wolfowitz, Feith, Richard Perle, together with neoconservative media
propagandists, such as William Kristol and Max Boot, have been walking
around safe for years unmolested by terrorists seeking revenge or
bringing retribution to those responsible for as many as 1,000,000
Muslim deaths.
Condi Rice, Colin Powell, who delivered the Speech of Lies to the UN
inaugurating the invasion of Iraq, and Dick Cheney, whose minimal Secret
Service protection could not withstand a determined assassination
attempt, also enjoy lives unmolested by terrorists.
Remember the deck of cards that the Bush regime had with Iraqi faces?
If terrorists had a similar deck, all of those named above would be
“high value targets.” Yet, there has not been a single attempt on any
one of them.
Strange, isn’t it, that none of the above are faced with a terrorist
threat. Yet, the tough, macho Navy Seals who allegedly killed Osama bin
Laden must have their identity kept hidden so that they don’t become
terrorist targets. These American supermen, highly trained killers
themselves, don’t dare show their faces, but Rodriguez, Rumsfeld, and
Condi Rice can walk around unmolested. Indeed, the Seals’ lives are so
endangered that President Obama gave up the enormous public relations
political benefit of a White House ceremony with the heroic Navy Seals.
Very strange behavior for a politician. A couple of weeks after the
alleged bin Laden killing, the Seals unit, or most of it, was wiped out
in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan.
If you were a Muslim terrorist seeking retribution for Washington’s
crimes, would you try to smuggle aboard an airliner a bomb in your
underwear or shoe in order to blow up people whose only responsibility
for Washington’s war against Muslims is that they fell for Washington’s
propaganda? If you wanted to blow up the innocent, wouldn’t you instead
place your bomb in the middle of the mass of humanity waiting to clear
airport security and take out TSA personnel along with passengers?
Terrorists could coordinate their attacks, hitting a number of large
airports across the US at the same minute. This would be real terror.
Moreover, it would present TSA with an insolvable problem: how can
people be screened before they are screened?
Or coordinated attacks on shopping malls and sports events?
Why should terrorists, if they exist, bother to kill people when it
is easy to cause mayhem by not killing them? There are a large number
of unguarded electric power substations. Entire regions of the country
could be shut down. The simplest disruptive act would be to release
large quantities of roofing nails in the midst of rush hour traffic in
Boston, New York, Washington DC, Atlanta, Dallas, Chicago, Los Angeles,
San Francisco. You get the picture: thousands and thousands of cars
disabled with flat tires blocking the main arteries for days.
Before some reader accuses me of giving terrorists ideas, ask
yourself if you really think people so clever as to have allegedly
planned and carried out 9/11 couldn’t think of such simple tactics,
plots that could be carried out without having to defeat security or
kill innocent people? My point isn’t what terrorists, if they exist,
should do. The point is that the absence of easy-to-do acts of terrorism
suggests that the terrorist threat is more hype than reality. Yet, we
have an expensive, intrusive security apparatus that seems to have no
real function except to exercise power over American citizens.
In place of real terrorists carrying out easy plots, we have
“terrorist” plots dreamed up by FBI and CIA agents, who then recruit
some hapless or demented dupes, bribing them with money and heroic
images of themselves, and supplying them with the plot and fake
explosives. These are called “sting operations,” but they are not. They
are orchestrations by our own security agencies that produce fake
terrorist plots that are then “foiled” by the security agencies that
hatched the plots. Washington’s announcement is always: “The public was
never in danger.” Some terrorist plot! We have never been endangered
by one, but the airports have been on orange alert for 11.5 years.
The federal judiciary and brainwashed juries actually treat these
concocted plots as real threats to American security despite the
government’s announcements that the public was never in danger.
The announcements of the “foiled” plots keep the brainwashed public
docile and amenable to intrusive searches, warrantless spying, the
growth of an unaccountable police state, and endless wars.
The “War on Terror” is a hoax, one that has been successfully used to
destroy the US Constitution and to complete the transformation of law
from a shield of the people into a weapon in the hands of the state. By
destroying habeas corpus, due process, and the presumption of
innocence, the “War on Terror” has destroyed our security.
