September 11th 2001 – Counter-insurgency For The World, by Joe Quinn

In an ideal society, those chosen to represent and lead the people would be chosen because they had shown ‘leadership qualities’ – honesty, integrity, intelligence (both emotional and intellectual) and, most importantly, a paternal or maternal protective instinct towards others. In short, leaders would be those that could effectively lead the society in a way that secured the best interests of all. Ideal leaders would certainly not be ‘war-like’ but rather peace-makers. So why don’t we have societies like this around the world today? Does power really corrupt? Is it inevitable that any human being elevated to a leadership role will succumb to the lure of power and control over others and ultimately turn bad and against the people? Do we conclude therefore that the very idea that one or a few should lead the many is simply a bad one?

It’s true that human history is embarrassingly bereft of these ideal leaders. The ones that history records as being ‘great’ were very often the most war-like and directly or indirectly caused the most suffering to innocent people. Genghis Khan, Alexander the Great, Napoleon, FDR, Winston Churchill….George W Bush?

There have been a few notable exceptions though, Martin Luther King, is one, JFK is another, and there are undoubtedly many less-well-known examples from all over the planet (Benazir Bhutto for a more recent example). But in the case of these three, and many others of similar calibre, you may have noticed that they have an unfortunate tendency to be assassinated by, we are told, irate citizens who bizarrely, cannot abide their attempts to be truly great leaders in the ideal sense. Of course, I am being a little facetious here, because there is strong evidence to suggest that MLK, JFK, Bhutto and many others who were allegedly assassinated by ‘lone nuts’ were in fact murdered by the competition – the corrupt leaders.

Perhaps the real problem then is that our species’ rather poor track record of benevolent leaders is not simply due to inherent flaws in ‘human nature’ but rather the presence of specific ‘types’ of humans who LACK certain natural human traits, empathy and compassion being the most important ones. As many readers will already know, psychopaths fit this profile particularly well.

When this type of human being accedes to a position of power, the normal human beings over whom they rule are in trouble. It is a certainty that such leaders will immediately begin to manifest evidence of corruption and greed and will come to view the people as the means through which they can accrue more power and wealth. At the same time however, it must be obvious that the people also constitute a clear threat to this ‘elite’ and their privileged position. The people can, theoretically, at any moment rebel and overthrow their masters. For the elite then, the people play the role of both cash cow and a potentially deadly enemy that must be contained by whatever means.

There is extensive evidence to show that, throughout history, the elite have invested heavily in developing the most effective strategies to control the population and neutralize any potential popular revolutions. Much of the theory has been developed as a result of military campaigns by the British and American governments in the course of invading and colonizing other countries. From India to South America to Africa and Asia, between them, the British and American elite have been responsible for the deaths of at least 20 million people in dozens of different countries during the last 150 years.

In India for example, somewhere in the region of 7 million were starved to death as a result of the British manufactured ‘famine’ of 1876. Another false famine was provoked by the British in 1900 causing the deaths of 1 million, and again at the height of the Second World War, ‘famine’ struck the Bengal region killing 3 million while the British stockpiled and exported Indian food.

By the time US troops finally pulled out of Vietnam, the US government had been directly responsible for the deaths of at least 3 million Vietnamese and Cambodians, the vast majority being civilians.

In El Salvador in the 1980s, (just one of several S. American nations that were effectively colonized by the USA) 70,000 civilians were killed by ‘death squads’ under US direction. I could go on.

In all such ‘counter-insurgency’ campaigns waged by US and British forces on behalf of the elite, the singular objective is to isolate and destroy a grass-roots movement made up of ordinary civilians who see the injustice of the divide between the elite and the masses, with the ultimate aim being to destroy any threat to the ruling class. The theories of how to repress such popular movements were most clearly outlined by British General Frank Kitson, who cut his counter-insurgency teeth in places like Kenya, Cyprus and Northern Ireland.

The heart of Kitson’s theory of how to destroy a popular resistance movement includes: covert operations, torture, provocations, manipulation of fake dissident resistance groups which act to discredit the genuine liberation forces; psychological operations (perception management) and to articulate all these around two interconnected objectives: the reconquest of the population and the isolation and subsequent destruction of the resistance. According to Kitson, to win the psychological war, it is of utmost necessity that responsibility for all paramilitary measures used by state forces should rest with their enemy, or at least that public opinion should be convinced of this.

The aim of state-sponsored counter-rebellion or ‘counter-insurgency’ then is to subvert the rebels and the ideals for which they stand (most often social justice and equality, land rights etc.) and successfully portray the rebels and their ideology to the wider population (and world) as self-interested, fundamentally lawless and immoral who must be dealt with severely. In pursuit of this end, the benign ideological divisions that exist within most populations must be stirred up in an effort to split the grass-roots support for any rebellion and align a significant percentage of the population with the state and against the rebels. If successful in this effort, the terroristic state policies that provoked the rebels to form in the first place can be re-doubled and spun as lawful defence against the ‘terrorism’ of the rebels.

The strategy is essentially divide the population and thereby ‘conquer’ them. A second and equally important provision of the counterinsurgency doctrine is the creation of fake resistance groups that carry out attacks to discredit the real resistance, otherwise known as ‘false-flag’ operations. These operations include attacks on the civilian population themselves that appear to have been carried out by the resistance, effectively turning people who would otherwise unite against the elite against each other. Throughout the 20th century, these counter-insurgency strategies were used by covert military and intelligence agencies exclusively within individual nations. But what if it were deemed that the goal was global rather than local? What if, as a member of the elite, you wanted to divide not just a local population but a large section of the global population and turn them against each other? Could the counter-insurgency strategies be applied in such a case?

The September 11th 2001 attacks were a text-book example of precisely this – counterinsurgency tactics applied globally. For several decades, liberation movements within Muslim nations have been threatening the American, Israeli and British stranglehold on their natural resources and populations. A decision was taken within the ruling elite of these nations to destroy these movements and the threat they posed to the elite’s ascendancy once and for all. At the same time, the elite would be in a position to consolidate their control over those nations and their natural resources. In the years before the 9/11 attacks, and following counter-insurgency tactics, a fake resistance group, given the name ‘al-Qaeda’, was created and propagandized and used to carry out the September 11th 2001 attacks. This effectively divided the global population along religious lines and terrorised the non-Muslim population into providing the ‘political capital’ which has been used to justify the invasion and occupation of both Iraq and Afghanistan and the wholesale slaughter of the members of the Iraqi and Afghan populations who posed a threat to the elite.

Through ‘shock and awe’ attacks like 9/11, the elite of this world have done an excellent job of dividing the global population against itself. If we sit back and think about it for a moment, it is painfully clear just who the real enemy of ‘we the people’ is. How can we allow ourselves to be fooled into thinking that some shady band of ‘Muslim terrorists’ are bent on our collective destruction, or that Muslims the world over want to convert or kill all non-Muslims, when we have concrete examples of the utterly corrupt and selfish nature of our leader in the recent banking scandal or the BP oil spill for but two examples?

I have often sat in ‘shock and awe’ myself at how so many people can still believe the official story about the 9/11 attacks. But then I realise that so many people are so ignorant of history, mainly because the truth of history has been covered up. The truth of human history is a sorry tale of successive groups of psychologically deviant individuals rising to positions of power and proceeding to squeeze the life blood out of the masses of normal people, and in that way keep them more or less enslaved. More than that, there is overwhelming evidence to support the claim that ‘terrorism’ is not a weapon wielded by some wild-eyed religious or political fanatic, but rather a carefully developed strategy, employed by the elite and implemented by state actors to ensure that the will of the masses of humanity is never truly exercised.