This is what happens when a crime is redefined as war

[muriel_volestrangler]

The proper investigation of terrorist conspiracy has been wrecked by cynical politics. Meddling has again made us less safe

The sun never sets on the war on terror, even as it degenerates into blood and recrimination. The Woolwich trial of eight members of a supposed 13-member gang all but collapsed on Monday. Despite evidence of intent to blow up an airliner, the jury convicted three defendants of conspiracy to commit murder but failed to reach a verdict on the central allegation.

It has been an open secret in police circles that Operation Overt, the most complex in counter-terror history, was sabotaged by the American vice president, Dick Cheney, desperate for a headline boost to the Republicans' 2006 mid-term elections. British intelligence was following trails and acquiring evidence against 20 suspects. They needed American surveillance help in Pakistan and shared their information, foolishly it now appears, with Washington.
...
Cheney then privately dispatched the CIA's operations director, Jose Rodriguez, to Islamabad to secure the arrest of one of the British suspects, Rashid Rauf, believed to be a possible link with al-Qaida. The British had been watching him and preparing his extradition. They did not want him rendered useless through CIA or Pakistani torture. Within days, news of Rauf's capture reached the British plotters. In a panic, the police had desperately to round up as many suspects as they could find overnight. According to Suskind, "top officials in British intelligence cursed, threw ashtrays and screamed bloody murder".
...
Worse than wreck it, they rendered the operation counter-productive. A few sad, disaffected and clearly dangerous youths were captured, but in such a way as to induce many more to sympathise and imitate them. They will be fired by the same resentment at British foreign policy that has turned a crusade to bring democracy to the heathen into a bloody and drawn-out meddling in the affairs of foreign states. That meddling is now overwhelmingly counter-productive, fuelling anti-western insurgency across an arc from Syria through Iraq and Afghanistan to Pakistan. Characterised everywhere as a war on terror, it is further politicised and polarised.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/sep/10/1

[Uncle Joe]

1. Thanks for the thread, muriel_volestrangler.

Kicked and recommended.

[stillcool]

2. The worst part of this for me..

is that in no longer phases me.

Last week's massive operation by Nato forces to move a dam turbine 100 miles across Helmand was reportedly brought forward at Washington's insistence to help John McCain's candidacy. It cost some 300 Afghan lives. Every one of those lives invites revenge against that dam. Meanwhile, Nato and the Americans are intensifying their bombing of Afghan and Waziri villages. Anyone who visits this theatre is briefed with the same mantra: We are going to stop killing civilians ... Every death is 10 recruits to the enemy ... We must win on the ground not from the air. Airforces claim they can kill with "pinpoint accuracy". They claim the new predator drones can murder a Taliban leader at a mile distant.

They lie. To soldiers on the ground, calling in air power to clear a village is easier and safer than fighting by hand. As a result, and amid a storm of mendacious denials, wedding parties are blown to pieces, houses are crushed, women and children are massacred. To kill a Taliban it is considered worth wiping out a market. British and American generals in Kabul have slid into Vietnam mode, using the enemy kill rate as an indicator of victory. They do not care that one dead Taliban creates 10 live ones.