Terrorism – War on Terror

William Astore May 6, 2021 Introduction to the article Once upon a time, the Europeans had the copyright on naming lengthy wars: the Hundred Years’ War, the Eighty Years’ War, the Thirty Years’ War. I suspect, however, that it’s past time for the U.S. to enter that competition. After all, soon after we arrive at September 11, 2021, barring a genuine surprise, this country will have been fighting its twenty-first-century wars unsuccessfully for two decades. In other words, the conflict launched as the Global War on Terror in the days after the 9/11 attacks (the one that then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld imagined targeting terror networks in up to 60 countries) has never either faintly succeeded or ended. It’s only spread to ever newer realms of death and disaster in distant lands (while bouncing back on this country in ever stranger ways), even as trillions and trillions of taxpayer dollars went down the drain. Shouldn’t the increasingly riven citizens of...

Here’s why we used the numbers we did — and what they can and can’t tell us. David Vine December 5th, 2020 Over the last week, considerable debate arose around a calculation I helped produce showing that the wars the U.S. government has fought since the attacks of September 11, 2001, have forced at least 37 million people — and perhaps as many as 59 million — to flee their homes. Originally published by Foreign Policy In Focus, FPIF, on September 23, 2020 As a co-author of the underlying report, produced for Brown University’s Costs of War Project, I was encouraged by the attention in the media — which ranged from the New York Times to Fox News — because it has generated interest in the millions of people displaced by the U.S. “global war on terror.” My American University co-authors and I note that no one inside or outside the U.S. government has previously calculated how many people these...

Steven Sahiounie November 09, 2020 29 Oct 2020 – The beheading of a teacher in France elicited inflammatory remarks from President Emmanuel Macron, which in turn has been met with an Arab boycott of French goods and outrage by the Muslim world. Macron is accusing Muslims of separatism and is introducing a new bill to crack down on this sin against French values. Originally posted on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on November 2nd, 2020 here Arab boycott of French products Hashtags in English and French, such as #boycottfrenchproducts, as well as in Arabic are trending on Twitter and other social media following a call to boycott French products across the Muslim world, in response to an “anti-Islam” attitude displayed following the murder of a French teacher. In Qatar, major supermarket chains started removing French products from their shelves, while the Al Meera company said in a press release October 23, “We affirm, as a national company, that we operate with a vision...

/08/28/new-associate-gordon-dumoulin/”>Gordon Dumoulin September 11, 2020 19 years after the horrific September 11 ! We must never forget innocent individual victims of war and other violence. But there is more to the day of September 11 and what has been the consequence of the US response to it. On 9/11, 1906, the nonviolent movement led by Gandhi was born in South Africa — TFF Associate Chaiwat Satha-Anand wrote about it on The Transnational 15 years ago. On 9/11, 1973, the coup d’etat in Chile took place with heavy US involvement, leading to the death of President Salvador Allende and the Pinochet dictatorship. And on 9/11, 2001, targets in New York and Washington representing the economic, military and political power of the US Empire were hit, killing almost 3000 people (around 12% non-US citizens). The US response was to initiate — with the attack on Afghanistan on “10/7” — the Global War...

Chris Hedges September 4, 2020 Chris Hedges discusses “Ghost Riders of the Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge,” with author Danny Sjursen, combat veteran and West Point. It’s RT’s “On Contact”. If you want to know more about Sjursen, here is his SceptialVet homepage. Originally posted on Scheerpost’s website on August 17, 2020. Please help TFF remain truly independent by contributing if you benefited from this article Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor, and NPR. He is the host of the Emmy Award-nominated RT America show On Contact. He has written 12 books, including the New York Times best-seller “Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt” (2012), which he co-authored with the cartoonist Joe...

June 15, 2020 Nick Turse 27 Feb 2020 –Last month, about a dozen al-Shabab fighters infiltrated the perimeter of a military base in Manda Bay, Kenya. One of them took aim with a rocket-propelled grenade, firing at a U.S. surveillance plane and touching off an hourslong firefight. When it was all over, the two American pilots of that plane and a U.S. soldier were dead, two other U.S. military personnel were wounded, six surveillance aircraft and helicopters were destroyed, and parts of the airfield were in flames. Originally posted on Transcend Media Service on March 2, 2020 Where there are U.S. bases, there is the potential for such attacks, because bases are not just launching pads for offensive military operations, but targets for them too. Since 9/11, the U.S. military has built a sprawling network of outposts in more than a dozen African countries. The Intercept has obtained U.S. military documents...

By Dave Lindorff May 04, 2020 Now that the flags are back waving from the tops of flagpoles across the country, and the maudlin paeans to the close to 3000 lives lost in the airplane attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, it’s time we gave a thought to the dead who were ignored. Originally posted on ‘This Can’t Be Happening’ on September 19, 2019 According to very conservative estimates, as reported by the “Costs of War” project of Brown University’s Watson Institute on International and Public Affairs, nearly 250,000 civilians have been killed during the 18 years since September 2001 in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan in wars or attacks that were instigated by the United States. Those are very conservative figures carefully compiled by organizations like Iraq Body Count and the Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies. These numbers are people known to have...

Joseph Biden for president! Yesterday his main rival for the Democratic Party’s nomination, Bernie Sanders, endorsed him. If the world could vote, the overwhelming majority would vote for Biden, despite some misgivings. My reservations would be on his foreign policy. Like President Barack Obama he would be good on domestic policy but mistaken on much of his foreign policy. Obama made Biden responsible for dealing with the Ukraine crisis where he fashioned an anti-Russian policy based on little evidence that this was fair to the facts. He writes now of the need to “counter Russian aggression” and that “we must impose real costs on Russia for its violations of international norms”. If he can’t get Russian policy right, what hope is there he will get other issues right? We don’t need an unnecessary second Cold War. If the US can’t have a policy for rapid nuclear disarmament with Russia, going well...

Let’s get death in proportion. True, Coronavirus is an appalling disease but the number of deaths it has caused this year is far lower than deaths caused by either common flue, car accidents, drug-taking, alcoholism or cigarette smoking.  Governments don’t like these things and make an effort to combat them. But they don’t get themselves as worked up as they have with Coronavirus (For starters, why don’t they outlaw all smoking?). A Russian friend texted me from Moscow the other day saying the pandemic we should worry about is “the pandemic of fear”. Where is our sense of proportion? Another issue to examine in order to clarify our thinking is how many people have US and NATO troops killed compared with the numbers killed by terrorism. Again it is a matter of getting things in proportion. Terrorism puts the fear of God up to people and governments. But there’s less...

March 26, 2020 By Edward Curtin A Review There are very few writers who have done more to try to open the public’s mind to the evil nature of the American empire than David Ray Griffin.  His series of books on the false flag attacks of September 11, 2001, will endure for a long time, and they will one day when it is safe to do so, be recognized as seminal texts exposing the traitorous conspiracy of elements within the United States’ government to launch the endless so-called war on terror.  That many now know, and many more will, that those so-called “terrorist” attacks were carried out by terrorists in the highest reach of the U.S. government will be due to his extraordinary work. What many do not know is that David Ray Griffin is a Christian theologian with impeccable credentials and a scholarly oeuvre of dozens of theological books....

Above a modified image of President Ronald Reagan with Afghan mujahideens – ‘freedom fighters’ against Soviet communism – in 1983. Since George W. Bush – a friend of the bin Laden family – declared the global “War On Terror” in October 2001, it has cost the American taxpayers approximately 6.6 trillion dollars and thousands of fallen sons and daughters… And it has involved virtually all Western – NATO/EU – countries, sent millions of refugees and terrorists in all directions and created a surveillance state everywhere. It has come to threaten and undermine privacy, trust, freedom and democracy – in short, undermined everything the West/Occident believed it stood for. It has destroyed the idea of the good society and a future in peace. And has it succeeded in reducing or abolishing terrorism? No, on the contrary. In the years up to 9/11 2001 about 400 people were killed in political terrorist...

February 21, 2020 By Garikai Chengu Much like Al Qaeda, the Islamic State (ISIS) is made-in-the-USA, an instrument of terror designed to divide and conquer the oil-rich Middle East and to counter Iran’s growing influence in the region. The fact that the United States has a long and torrid history of backing terrorist groups will surprise only those who watch the news and ignore history. Originally published September 19, 2014, by Counterpunch The CIA first aligned itself with extremist Islam during the Cold War era. Back then, America saw the world in rather simple terms: on one side, the Soviet Union and Third World nationalism, which America regarded as a Soviet tool; on the other side, Western nations and militant political Islam, which America considered an ally in the struggle against the Soviet Union. The director of the National Security Agency under Ronald Reagan, General William Odom recently remarked, “by...