The New Terror Image

The bull dozer driver who ploughed two buses and other vehicles, killing three and wounding 45 in Jerusalem on July 2 is the newest staggering image of terror. There is a sub continental counterpart of it: the human torpedo of the LTTE of which the Sri Lankan government has duly warned New Delhi. It calls for a better understanding of the alibi for terror and how to resolve it. If not, such newer ways of resorting to terror, murder and mayhem would continue appearing and transforming into new shapes. Human development and growth of civilization on the earth requires that we truly search out rather than keep on justifying one side or the other. There is something seriously wrong when a man drives a 20-tonne earth moving vehicle 500 metres along Jaffa Road to lodge protest and draw world attention.

The bull dozer was an Israeli citizen of Arab origin and came from a modest income family. There was assurance of his easy mobility within his country. But he was from east Jerusalem which is mainly populated by the Palestinians of Arab origin akin to their counterparts, Jews. Hence both are Semite people. His identity card was on him. He was employed in construction work as a driver of the bull dozer. He had two children and was about 30 years old. As a citizen of his country there is obviously no ground why he should do what he did that fateful day. Probably he was not a displaced internally or externally like most of the Palestinians are either in the refugee camps of Lebanon and elsewhere.

Violence and terror has become self sustaining in the Middle East. Which began what is difficult to clearly demarcate. Disproportionate use of force in itself is self generating terror. That is one of the reasons why a Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri made the observation: "We consider it as a natural reaction to the daily aggression and crimes committed against our people in the West Bank and all over the occupied lands." This is the rut of self justification from which it is now difficult to come out. No amount of shuttle diplomacy of Condoleezza Rice or Solana would undo the snare in which the Palestinians and Israelis find themselves.

After the war in 1967 and the Yom Kippur war of 1973 there was a time when hijacking aero planes was the only way the Palestinians could react to the Zionist outrage of occupation of their land and their forced expulsion from the place of their birth. The West reacted rather hostilely by objecting to this mode of terror which the Palestinians considered legitimate way of getting back to those who had made them so miserable. Among the families uprooted was that of their leader Yasser Arafat. Targeting civilian planes made the West repugnant. As the Palestinians are more informed and democratic than many others in the Middle East they realized that they could not swim against the tide and it forced the Palestinians to resort to more individualized and personalized means of expressing their grievances and venting their volcanic frustrating impotence of the suppression and oppression of the occupation. Suicide fidayeen appeared on the stage to make the world know how personalized their suffering has been and how violent their reaction. As the Israeli police chief, Dudi Cohen, said the attacker appeared to have been acting alone. "It looks as if it was a spontaneous act."

Every scene of murder and mayhem is equally revolting. Change the identity of the victim the casualty is purely human. The above injured Israelis citizen is a picture of pity so is the driver below whom a soldier off duty shot twice in the head and then an antiterrorist office shot and dispatched him forever(below).

Terror rose in the region as a result of the lacerating vetoes the American used so very often that they left no hope of any solution. The Non Alignment Movement was still around and had some leverage. But the Americans had armed the Israelis so much that no one could match them. Moreover the proverbial disunity among the Arabs was self defeating. The Soviet Union was also there to counterbalance the American. It could shore up some support but it died a premature death all of a sudden. Egypt enjoyed close relationship with the Soviet Union but it did not translate into any monetary benefit. The Shah of Iran was not only an ally of the US but also of Israel. Turkey was so indifferent to the Arabs and the Palestinians. So the Palestinians had to rely on themselves, individually in self sacrificing and together in waging the Intifada. That did produce a chemistry of change. It is continuing.

The basics of the alibi of terror can be outlined:
The Palestinians choose suicide bombing because of the occupation of their land and their displacement as well as the phenomenal cruelty of the Israelis.
The Israelis use their superior military power in response to suicide bombing and rockets fired into its territories, both occupied and land within its jurisdiction from its contrived birth, thanks mainly to the US.
The basic (1) is not the antecedent to the basic (2). For example the construction of a railway line connecting East and West Jerusalem for which the driver was working can be in itself the cause of the present terror. The railway is a means of the expansionist design of the Zionism. It depends on how you view the events. As the two sides cannot overcome the compulsions of their own people and policy, the world must reenter into the negotiating process to resolve the impasse, now that ‘the American power has not declined but everybody else in the world has risen like India and China.’

Kashmir on the fault line of its land

What has happened in Kashmir valley over the past four days is not a picture of whole India. India does have religious strife and sectarian conflict in galore. But the present trouble is a matter of constitutional problem of identity of Kashmiriat that was assured to the people of that state. However the dispute over the allotment of 39.88 hectares of land for temporary shelter to Hindu pilgrims taking shape of a permanent feature of the land is having deep impact on the Kashmiri psyche. That is threatening to make India what Jagmohan feared “a torn and tormented India, an India that is continuously at war with itself.” Certainly India is not a torn country although there is some torment and continuous friction thanks to BJP and even Congress. It will ever be there till a foreseeable future. The present phase is nothing short of “nuts and bolts of operational reality” of the conceded meager autonomy.
The retiring Governor SK Sinha had prepared the plan of granting of land for the Amarnath pilgrims. It has transpired that the temporary shelters in the form of makeshift tent camps would change into permanent guest houses in which the annual visiting pilgrims would stay. They would become full fledged settlements for good. The phobia of the “outsiders” occupying their land haunts the ordinary Kashmiris. The incoming Governor NN Vohra sanctioned the proposed bill. The popular perception is that there is no ruckus over either the pilgrims or improvement of their transit facilities. But taking away forest land and changing the shape into a different identity mark did not go well with the people. Hence the resentment that the governors have undeclared agenda of cutting corners of whatever special status is given to the region through the Resettlement Act of 1983 or otherwise.
The Kashmiris themselves do not cry foul at the governor who is invariably a Hindu. This is despite the fact that some governors have had close link with the right wing parties and were self avowed Hindutvavadi. But lawyers point out that in other states where Muslims are in significant number there is no such arrangement whereby there is a Hindu chief minister and a Muslim governor. Kerala is the antipode. Hurriyat Conference, Peoples Democratic Party or Democratic Freedom Party in the valley does not look at the rest of the country when they agitate over the issue. To them their separate status and identity matter more and they fear the land allotment is an encroachment. Or else why has the resentment become so endemic. Could not have the governors seen all this?
Interestingly the matter was first raised by PDP whose leader Qazi Mohammad Afzal is the forest minister. His supporters and others are not so much concerned that permanent structures could pose threat to the delicate ecology of the region what with plastic and polythene and other non biodegradable things mixing in the soil or felling of the trees and all. It is the tone and tenor of the administration where a governor can extend Amarnath Yatra for a whole month and bring confrontation with the Chief Minister to a head. As it happened during Mufti Sayeed’s tenure. Or, the Centre considering right to information celebrity Wajahat Habibullah to replace SK Sinha leading VHP and BJP to threaten a stir against the move. The central security forces have their own perspective. One CRPF soldier killed Farooq Ahmad Rahi (18) standing on the second floor of his house, not part of the protesters on the ground. There are also different hobby horses which the governors ride in a marked contrast to the elected representatives and their leader. Sinha wanted to manage not only Vaishno Devi pilgrimage but also start a Vaishno Devi University in Jammu. Creating a separate board for reviving Shiv Khori yatra in Reasi, Kailash Kund and the Machail yat in Doda and setting up of a Shardapeeth Unioversity in Kashmir were also on his anvil. As a senior reporter from the valley put it : the protest “reflects the people’s anger and distrust for outgoing governor Lt-Gen S.K. Sinha’s (retired) extra-constitutional ways of conducting himself and running the shrine board, and government’s silence over the matter,”
A divided administration on such a fault line bodes ill for the country as it did not so long ago.

Maharashtra and its bomb blasts

Finally the Hindu bomb has surfaced. The real question is when it materialized on the scene and under whose patronage. The answer to the two questions holds the key to a host of bomb blasts which have taken place in the country. There are loose strands that need to be tied together. For example Hindu Janjagaran Samiti is registered in Goa (IE 19-6-8) where one of the accused in Nanded blast of April 2006 spent more than two years of training in arms after his stint with a tall sturdy man named “Mithun Chakravarty” of Poona, an expert in bomb making. A rickshaw driver had appeared on popular television channels claiming to have carried two passengers who had come from Malegaon in the late evening of September 8, 2006. They had remarked that they had done the work much earlier in the day what was scheduled for later in the night of Shabebarat.

To begin at the beginning, the first serial bomb blasts were of March 1993. The demolition of Babri masjid was water shed in the history of the country. Bal Thackeray has often said that he was happy that his Shiv Sainiks were instrumental in the destruction. The massacre of Muslims in December and January 1992-93 is also known for the leading role the Shiv Sena played in it. Going by the record of the serial blasts perpetrators, they have said that they were pushed to the wall and had to retaliate to stem what they believed was their genocide.

Since then Mahrashtra has been the focus of terrorist attacks which has entered in what some have termed as a tit for tat phase. Terror breeds terror. The next major terrorist attack was on the local trains in July 2006 which many feared was a blowback to the pogroms of Muslims in Gujarat of 2002. The targets were the first class compartments which the Gujarati merchants generally travel in. The middle class Gujarati merchants of the cosmopolitan Mumbai form the bulk of support for Narendra Modi government in Gujarat.

The third major attack of terror was on September 8, 2006 in Malegaon. The main cemetery mosque and the neighbouring Mushawarat chowk were targets at the precise time of Friday prayer, quite reminiscent of the Black Friday of Mumbai 1993. Needless to say that the bombers wanted to kill Muslims alone.

In the meantime several mosques at Jalna, Purna, and Parbhani in the Marathwada region were targeted. The alleged perpetrators included extremist Hindus belonging to RSS, Bajrang Dal and VHP. There were also various mysterious blasts which need scrutiny.

(1) On April6, 2006 there was a powerful explosion at 1.30 a.m. at the house of the RSS activist Laxman Rajkondawar a retired irrigation engineer. The blast killed his son Naresh Rajkondawar (29) and Himanshu Panse (31). Rahul Pande was injured along with two others. He had run away but was arrested later. At 5.am an FIR was lodged that firecrackers blew up there. Those who were the earliest to visit the injured were BJP MP DB Patil, Shiv Sena’s Prakash Kaudge and Milind Ektate, VHP’s Navin Bhat Thakkar and Bajrangdal’s Sanjay Kodge. House search in the area led to arms cache: One live bomb along with ten live rounds of 7.65 mm, generally used in rifles as well as false beards, skull caps worn by Muslims, Kurta, maps of mosques in Aurangabad. Inspector General Mr Gupta held a press conference on April 7th and revealed that actually bombs were made there at the house of Laxman Rajkondawar and the casualties were caused by bomb explosion. Subsequently a new FIR was registered on April 9 which replaced crackers with bombs as the cause. One of the accused is Sanjay Chaudhari who received phone calls from BD, VHP and RSS activists assuring him of early release. . ACP ATS Anil J Tamaichekar who submitted a report saying that the diary of Maroti Keshav Wagh shows that it was a well organized team and the explosion was an accident. The diary recovered shows how Himanchu had visited Aurangbad in 2004 and surveyed a mosque with a photographer who had taken snaps of the mosque from several angles. There was a map with the mosque clearly marked. Himansu had taken training in Goa for two years.

Maroti Wagh took training at Bhosla Military School at Nagpur then went to Pune and planted a bomb at the Mohammadia mosque in Parbhani. Naresh was pivotal in organizing attacks. He had called Vinod Kamtikar from his mobile, number 9822297494 on April 5 and told him to keep a motor bike ready for Maroti Keshave Wagh, time was l.30 a.m. April 7, 2006.

(2)Pandurang Ameelkanthwar (28) died on the spot as he was carrying biscuit boxes which exploded on February 10, 2007 in Nanded. His cousin Dnaneshwar Manikwar sustained 72 per cent burns and died on February 16 at JJ Hospital, Mumbai.

These blasts were quite weird in nature and give a hint of deep rooted conspiracy. The cause was not any immediate grievance like any pogrom or massacre from which members of their community had suffered in the present.

Then cultural and religious perceived slur transmorphed into grievance that produced terror. Jodha Akbar and Aamhi Pachpute are cultural artifacts of Hindus.

The sevaks of revivalist Sanatan Sanstha Ramesh Hanumant Gadkari (50), Mangesh Nikam (34), Santosh Angre (26), and Vikram Bhave (26) have claimed that theirs was a self start group and self financed attempt to make bombs and explode at Thane, Vashi and Penn theatres and public places. They had bought shrapnel from Panvel eight timers costing Rs 550 from Lhar Chawl and batteries from Grant road and also detonators, gelatin sticks and ammonium nitrate from different parts of Mumbai. This is a do-it-for-yourself work, vintage Maharashtra. Gadkar and Angre were picked up by the police from the Sanatan Ashram at Devat, Panvel, Nikam from Satara, and Bhave from Wadala. Gadkari who has a diploma in electronic engineering made the circuits. Nikam was involved in bomb blast in Ratnagiri in 2006 but was acquitted. Bhave had a record of being involved in a brawl with relatives of a girl who had come to take her from the Sanatan Ashram. Gadkari and Angre had also planted a bomb at a mosque at Pen highway to check the intensity of the device at the time of Diwali to camouflage the sound of explosion. .

There is a clear attempt to modify their statements after arrest according to legal consideration. For example Ramesh Gadkar has first said that his wife Neela, a fellow sevak, had gone to plant the bomb at Gadkary Rangayatan hall in Thane. Afterward he said that it was Vikram Bhave who had accompanied him there.
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Most ominous is Gadkari’s complaint to the judge “The police are putting pressure on my family and not considering my statement. They want a statement according to their will.” (TOI 19-6-8). What is this will? The police have allegedly changed records in Nanded blasts and could do this time too. This could lead ultimately to acquittal and the framing of the regular run of the mill terrorists. There is a good deal of coded words. In his Saamna editorial Thackeray speaks of “mini Pakistan”, where he would admire these latter day terrorists to plant bombs. “Mini Pakistan” not only refers to illegal Bangladeshi bastis which are not Pakistani, but also a Muslim majority area. Most common example is Malegaon or Bhiwandi. Is there anyone who can dare to seek explanation of the code?

Communalizing terror to terrorize communities

It is no surprise that Bal Thackeray has called for Hindu suicide bomber squads to be formed. When did he not call for it? He did not call for it when Muslims were killed in Malegaon, Hyderbad, Jama Masjid of Delhi, Marathada mosques in his own Mahrashtra, Ajmer and a host of other places. But he did call for Hindu suicide squads when the local trains in Mumbai were targeted, or the twin bomb blasts at the Gateway of India and the Zhaveri bazaar. These latter attacks in his perception were anti national and anti Hindu although there were several Muslims killed in these attacks, too. The former incidents of terror did not bother him because the victims were Muslims and he did not worry about them for he has been dubbing them anti national, all the same.

It is a situation like the fish which cannot live without water. Unless there is communal tension some parties cannot roast their chestnuts. The failure of the national election commission is that it does not act in a rational manner and derecognize such parties after due process of taking cognizance of the speeches and acts of the party leaders who stoke the communal fire. The courts also are lackadaisical in their treatment of offenses relating to the breach of Article 153 of the IPC. Studying the legal implication by the home department of the state is surely a sign of dilly dally. The real aim is to delay justice and delaying justice is denying justice, they know their game well. They have been at it off and on since there is no political will to fight for the right. Such statements which are crystal clear in tone and implication are put on the back burner of filibustering. What else is there to see and ponder when Thackeray says: “When I heard of Hindu’s making bombs, I was happy but the fact that there were used to injure Hindus made me feel ashamed of them.”

It is strange that when the Muslims in the country are waking to the danger of terror, much of it truly or untruly ascribed to them, the Hindu harday samrat Thackeray should have chosen to voice his very menacing thought that matches the warning on the door of the UNO. It is still fresh in the minds of the people how the Deoband seminary issued its edict on terror. "In Islam, creating social discord or disorder, breach of peace, rioting, bloodshed, pillage or plunder and killing of innocent persons anywhere in the world are all considered most inhuman crimes." The edict also exhorts the Muslims "to wipe out all kinds of terrorism and to spread the message of global peace"

Thackeray’s outburst is upping the ante against the so called jihadi terrorism. That is the fig leaf that hardly hides his dreadful intent and horrifying import. That is nothing but quintessentially saber rattling before the terrified eyes of his quarry.

A bomb planted in the parking lot of BSE or near the parking lot of Hanuman temple in Jaipur, in the parking lot of the Gadkari auditorium or Ajmer shrine is unequivocally an act of terror. Be it HuJI or HJS, they are terrorists who did what they did. To get rid of the menace of terror it is efficacious to go to the spring source, the thoughts which breed terror. That is a reflection of the inscription on the entrance of the UNO, albeit it is about war.

As the general election comes nearer one brand of extremists would try to outdo the other. Narendra Modi’s insidious and frankly seditious suggestion to the Centre to not collect income tax as his proud five cror Gujaratis earn enough for what they need and Thackeray’s diatribe against the Muslims are of the same piece. They are fraught with potentials of creating social discord or disorder, breach of peace. In other words, anarchy.

Crisis of identiry: will a sectarian renaissance cure it?

It is strange that some people still harbour the illusion of an identity that would solve all our problems. A powerful dominant section in Maharashtra appropriates selected stories and images of Shivaji for its own political and cultural end. The end is exclusionary and partisan. The Maratha ruler in his time and context of history was not what some people would like everyone to believe as they believe. Equestrian statues of the Maratha king are in galore. The one near the Gateway of India where the tourists throng is enough. Interestingly the tourists crowd the piers of the Gateway to view the sea rather than look back at who is riding post haste with a raised sword and giving a clarion call. Having another off the shore from the Marine Drive would be another tourist attraction. The mighty statue of Rana Pratap Singh at Udaipur is splendid in terms of tourist attraction. Certain aspects of mass aggressive tendencies have so overwhelmed the common psyche of groups that they ascribe the same to the legendary figures of the past and make them mascots of present day political configurations and aspirations.

That such an identity would be appropriated by the ones filled with passionate intensity and the communalists for their interest to score over others is a forgone conclusion. Babu Bajrangi did not mince words when he referred to slaughtering Muslims in their hundreds and boasted, “Maza aata hai na, sahib. [I enjoy it]… I cam back after I killed them them (sic), called up the home minister and went to sleep… I felt like Rana Pratap, that I had done something like Maharana Pratap..I’d heard stories about him, but that day I did what he did himself. “ (Tehelka November 3, 2007)

The main purpose behind this skewed recourse to history is revivalism and not what some mistakenly believe a renaissance of a section of the society.

However, you cannot have a renaissance for the asking. If it is a rebirth of learning, as it really is, it is a secular matter. There has been revival of the mythical or mythological stories through television serials, like the Ramayna or the Maharbharat. That did produce revivalism and the whole movement of Ramjanam bhoomi that reached a climax in the demolition of the historic mosque at Ayodhya. It was craftily choreographed to win votes. We are still paying for it and perhaps nobody would like to have another such movement. Not the least in the name of a mythical bridge. There is already a conviction that we had had an Indian renaissance at the turn of the nineteenth century. Raja Ram Mohan Roy and Tagore were the fruits of that renaissance. Wanting another so soon is wishful thinking. Even so the ‘rebirth of learning’ has now been replaced by a much more revolutionary thing: the web. How much can anyone drink from a hose? The metaphor of the hose of water is apt as the net is ever enlarging the scope of knowledge. Knowledge is no more stored in any space that would lead to the spread of learning if it falls into hostile hands and artists and artisans migrate. Rebirth of learning in Europe also saw the Greek philosophers finding a new life after they hibernated with the Arabs. Will a renaissance in the name of religion lead to such rebirth? For an Iqbal or a Hussein, for example?

In the age of the internet, globalization and corporations there is need for a composite identity that is not only national but also tolerant. When the tiger roared at the lamb drinking water down the stream, it gave excuse that the lamb was polluting the water. And when the lamb replied that the water was flowing from the tiger to him, the tiger hit back saying that the lamb’s ancestors had done so. For the ills of society when people like Bal Thackeray, Subramanian Swamy and others, ala RSS, find scapegoat in Muslims it is high time to either dismiss them or take them seriously. All of them want to go back to pre British India to define identity of Indians, which they believe is essentially Hindu in character. Even if, for the sake of argument, we come to an agreement that we all have Hindu identity how are we going to solve the problems of unemployment, indebted farmers, insurgency in various parts of the country. Tamil tigers and Naxalites are essentially Hindu. Struggle for determining one’s homeland is as violent in the north east as it is across the Palk Strait.

Religion per se does not make its followers backward or forward in material terms. Therefore reserving jobs for the backward, be they Hindus or Muslims or anyone, is based on survey and findings. There has already been reservation based on religious identity of the Hindus. But it was extended to certain Muslims only recently on account of their backwardness. Thackeray not only calls it doling out of alms of concessions [saulatinchi khairat] but as a danger to the unity of the country. Because any reservation to Muslims would push the country into the abyss of another partition [dusraya phadni chya khol]. It implies that they are not trustworthy, hence their perfidy. Thus suspicion is created around that identity.

Defining group identity on what happened in1947 and viewing it as a crisis is forgetting one’s roots. Blaming Muslims for the partition and attributing “perfidy” [treachery] as the hallmark of their identity (as Swamy does in Is Hindu Reanaissance the Answer? Covert June 1-15, 2008, and Bal Thackeray in his letter to the Prime Minister, Samna, September 13, 2007) is banal.

Some people have become so schizophrenic that they want to live as if what happened in 1947 did not transpire. Thus they believe that the pre British India was still there for them, intact. They are just like the ukil babu or the lawyer in Shadow Lines of Amitav Ghosh. Their denial of 1947 is essentially the denial of the partition of India. Even if, again for sake of argument, we reverse history then the bulk of the hordes of talibans of Afghanistan and the North West Province of Pakistan would be at our door steps everywhere. That might not be very enviable, I suppose. The Indian Muslims would not like anymore tampering with history for they know very well that they have paid and are still paying for those who wanted their ‘pure’ land and got it and left the consequences for the Muslims of India to bear.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammad and His Jihad:“It's an inquisition, not a trial"

There is much talk on jihad and terrorism both in the West and India. Since the scourge of terrorism is spreading tentacles world wide there is need to sift through much that goes in its name. Most of intelligence report being classified we can only peep through what is available for clues.

Source of passion

The trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammad will be a remarkable event in world history. After the death of Mahdi [al Mahdi al Muntazar, otherwise Mohammad Ahmed] in Khartoum of the nineteenth century it would be the first time that the West will try and punish a Muslim self professed would be martyr. It is reported that everyday at 6 in the morning President George Bush reads the sermons of the Christian missionary preacher who was killed in the violent confrontation in the Sudanese capital of yore. He was besieged along with others in Sudan in 1885. Charles Gordon was sent by the British government to evacuate the British from Sudan but he stayed a year longer and wanted to destroy the Mahdiyah. They were the followers of Mahdi carrying out his revival and purification of Islam and fighting against the corruption of the Turkish and Egyptian and British influence on the people. The crusader and the jihadi since then have assumed new names and new identity.

President Bush got inspiration from preaching of the missionary priest who was in the British garrison with Gordon when it was besieged by the followers of al Mahdi. Interestingly al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden calls Bush and others as the crusaders. Khalid Sheikh Mohammad’s utterance in the court at Guantanamo Bay reminds much of the fervour of the jihad of al Mahdi.

KSM, as Khalid Sheikh Mohammad is briefly called, was arrested in Rawalpindi on March 1, 2003 in a search and arrest operation jointly conducted by the Pakistani and FBI. He had worked with Adman G. El Shukrijumah, a 27-year-old Saudi, the latter was equal to Mohammad Atta in position. Spectacular terrorist attack was the brainchild of KSM. In addition to the World Trade Centre towers there were other monuments as targets, the White House, the Manhattan Bridge as well as the ones in St Louis and San Francisco, the Sears towers in Chicago, the Israelis embassy in Washington. There were two dozen such attacks planned.

Intensity of passion

In the courtroom KSM shouted and chanted in undaunted zeal for martyrdom. 'Yes, this is what I wish, to be a martyr for a long time. I will, God willing, have this, by you.' When the military judge wanted to warn him he not only dismissed his lawyers but sang in lilting phrases of Arabic and translated them for the court: 'I may have the best legal team here. They may be well qualified but I want to represent myself. My shield is Allah most high.' In up fronting and putting in the centre he touched upon the most crucial situation vis-à-vis Islam and his trial: "It's an inquisition, not a trial!. We under five years were under torture. We don't have rights to anything. After all this torturing, they transfer us to inquisition and in Guantánamo." "I cannot accept any attorney who is not governed by sharia [Islamic] law. I will represent myself. I will not be represented by anybody even if he is a Muslim, because he will be sworn to your American Constitution. I consider all the U.S. Constitution and laws evil.”

He also took time to speak about the ignominy of allowing same sex marriage besides accusing the US of waging ‘a crusader war’ against Islam.

Razmi bin al Shibh was also forthright though, as it turned out, during the proceeding, that he was drugged against his will. "I am seeking martyrdom for five years. I tried for September 11 to get a visa and I could not. If this martyrdom happens today, I welcome it. God is great! God is great! God is great!". "I do understand I will be killed for the sake of God. But I don't understand that I am guilty." His lawyers then intervened to tell the court how drug was forcibly given to him. He sat with his feet shackled. He spoke again: "My mental capacity is absolutely fine. I don't think that there is reason to force lawyers on me that I don't want."

The CIA has already accepted that it practiced water boarding torture on KSM. According to the US laws any confessional statement obtained out of torture is inadmissible in court. The US also has used all the three kinds of renditions. KSM was arrested in Pakistan and imprisoned in a third country. This constituted the extraordinary rendition. He was then transferred to Guantanamo Bay in 2006.

Many of his claims are exaggerated including probably his boast: "I was responsible for the 9/11 operation, from A to Z." He also says he is responsible for thirty terrorist attacks.


Consequences of passion

The killing of Gordon and the missionary preacher and British soldiers in Khartoum resulted in massacre of the followers of Mahdi on a much larger scale. In the attack on the twin towers of World Trade Cetre 2973 innocent people perished. The death toll in Iraq and Afghanistan is astronomically much higher and continuing.

The war in Iraq began when there was no al Qaeda there. It has ravaged the country so much that it has given birth to terror that is hell bent to destroy the country. Afghanistan battle scenario is fast degenerating into another debacle for the US. Both the wars have caused huge number of casualties with no end in sight.

No doubt President Bush’s administration is there for about half a year the next president will surely close down Guantanamo Bay detention centre. The Supreme Court in the US has already castigated the detention facility and is going to hear a case again in a month’s time. The offshore detention centre also poses problems of international law regarding war and prisoners of war. With complete secrecy surrounding the trial who is there to verify KSM’s accusation: 'They mistranslated my words and put many words in my mouth.' Even his defence lawyer Navy captain Prescott Prince is groping in dark regarding the process of the proceedings in the military court. Then there is the terrifying restriction of keeping secret. Any detail coming out of the proceeding may be construed to be a threat to the United States of America. This would affect the attorney as well. Prince: "It is frustrating to me, and frustrating to him [ KSM], that he's presented with an attorney who in essence says: 'I don't know, the rules are new. They were made up for you."'

Last laugh

Alex Spillus of the British daily Telegraph was among the 60 reporters flown to the strangely named Justice Camp where there was no justice. No habeas corpus to the prisoners, the prisoners were held in notorious secret prisons [the gulags of our time] of the CIA for four years before they were held for 18 months in Guantanamo. The air flight to the camp on the Cuban island made the reporters feel what extraordinary rendition is as they sat huddled together buttock to buttock like prisoners. They were kept in tents where air conditioning units revved like Sherman tanks. Then came the comic relief. The judge told the prisoners that they had available to them lawyers free of charge. Pat came the retort from the 30 year old Kuwaiti Ali Abd al Aziz Ali: “ [America] tortured me free of charge, too.” "I am in the wrong court. I am not a criminal. My case is political."
The crowning irony: KSM and Razmi bin al Shibh extolled martyrdom over the travesty of their trial and mockery of the American justice. Raising doubts about the legality of the court was not enough. Lawyers of the defendant Mustafa Ahmed Adam al Hawsawi objected to the Judge Kohlmann that he had allowed nodding, gesticulating, and whispering among the defendants to make them look like conspirators.

Fighting terrorism with 'abuse of intelligence'

On June 1, 2008 the Australian contingent of 550 troops in Iraq lowered their flag at Camp Terendak in the southern Iraqi city of Talil, their Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has fulfilled the mandate of his people for the withdrawal that they gave him in the November 2007 election. The withdrawal of the Australian troops from Iraq has at long last justifies many people who have been skeptic of the war. There were two reasons for going to war, one, that Saddam Hussein was preparing WMD, and, two that there was link between his regime and al Qaeda. But what is obviously more damning than these false assumptions was the role of fudging of the intelligence agencies’ reports and the role of the US and in essence the detestable doctrine to which even others fell victim, namely, that you are either with us or against us. The ravages of the war are still in full display. The lesson learnt is that those who called for the destruction of evil ideology [Bush and Blair] have proved themselves not only wrong but what Harold Pinter has called the greatest terrorists of the world. Their ideology was evil and not that of Saddam Hussein. If Australia chose to go to war what else was there in common between the two: Australia and the US? As Rudd said on June 1, Howard wrongly believed that Australia's close alliance with the United States left him with no choice but to join the campaign in Iraq.

Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd not only exposed his predecessor John Howard as misled by the US but as too eager to gang up according to the predilection of the West that a WMD in the hands of Saddam Hussein would be more dangerous than an Ariel Sharon. In 1973 war it was this general in the desert of Sinai who used the most deadly weapons [rushed to him straight from the US] on the poorly equipped Egyptian army and slaughtered them in their thousands and had also used the Christian militia in the refugee camps of Sabrila and Chatila to massacre the unarmed civilians. The West chose to blame Saddam for what he did to the Kurds and the people of Southern swamp land of Iraq but not Ariel Sharon. With all this in the background the US and its hardcore allies still favour a hard line approach to the problems of the Middle East which cannot displease Israel let alone even the balance of justice. A corrupt prime minister elsewhere would have attracted another nefarious foreign policy article of the US: regime change. But Ehud Olmert like his predecessors does not come under the purview of this foreign policy otherwise readily available article.

One must recall the Spanish government’s decision to recall the Spanish soldiers from Iraq. On March 11, 2004 Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar blamed ETA [Basque separatists] for the Madrid bombing. Three days later his party lost the election. On March 15, the new government decided to pull out of Iraq. No one should be under the delusion that al Qaeda brought about this change through terror tactics. You can fool some Spaniards for some days but not all the Spaniards for all the time. Spain is a functional democracy. Australia took much longer to realize its folly. The bombing of Bali 2002 did not produce any change. But a concerted effort to better educate the electorate during the last election on the issue of fighting terrorism produced the chemical change which brought Rudd to power. Barrack Obama is also fighting for the change the electorate can believe in. Will he succeed for a change? The corrupt regimes of our time are the regimes of Bushes and Howards and Blairs. It is they who have whipped up mass hysteria of aggression. Others also had rushed to where angels feared to tread. That, too, with neighbours. But some sanity prevailed. India was also fighting terrorism.

Another folly of the war rhetoric is appropriating the western viewpoint for the entire world. This is pax Americana. America represents the world! Even reviewing Rudd’s decision to pull back troops reveals this rhetoric: White House press secretary Dana Perino said she had not reviewed Rudd's comments, but said the U.S. invasion was based on intelligence that the entire world had.[AP June3, 2008] How could the whole world have it unless the CIA had supplied to every world government its doctored intelligence?

Howard ruled Australia eleven years and Bush is completing eighth year What Rudd realized: "It caused me great pain as a long-standing friend of America to fundamentally part company with the administration's policy on Iraq," is still lost on Bush and Cheeny
The legacy of Blain continues with the British Prime Minister, John Brown. How long will the American electorate take to learn the truth of the war, the longest they have ever fought. Their indifference to words of advice from Jimmy Carter and Noam Chomsky shows a cussedness of character that their founder fathers had never thought of.

Why did President Bush then fudge the intelligence reports? His trusted friend and former press secretary McClellan provides the answer in his tell-tale book "What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception"( June 2008: “Bush and his advisers knew that the American people would almost certainly not support a war launched primarily for the ambitious purpose of transforming the Middle East." Therefore the ruse of WMD. McClellan says that Bush was not ‘open and forthright on Iraq’ and lied on ‘propaganda to sell the war.’
So America has lost much of its pragmatism and position as a result of this bogus war and the signs of decay contrary to wishful thinking of Samuel Huntington’s robust view of American civilization have set in. Pakistan an ally is also fighting war on terror but is secretly having talks with tribal chiefs in the North West frontier, which is a place where the US is carrying out air strikes on suspected al Qaeda leadership. It is another ally, Turkey that is carrying on negotiation with Syria on Golan Heights that too with tacit approval of the greatest of all allies of the US, Israel. Israel is building more settlements on occupied land although American policy is contrary to this. Noori Al Maliki government in Iraq gave hero’s welcome to President Ahmedinejad of Iran. The American propped government of Siniora in Lebanon is having sharing of power with Hezbollah. Egypt is talking with Hamas over the release of Israel solder captured by them. Egypt cannot be negotiating with an organization dubbed by the US as terrorist without the approval of the Israelis. On the top of it, the Bush juggernaut on terror has let China have a freedom of a field day. All in the name of fighting terrorism. How handy comes terrorism in the hands of some opportunists!