The alleged warning by the Inspector-General of Police, Mr. Mike Okiro,
of threat of Al Qaeda time bombs reported by two national newspapers in
May calls for deep worry from ordinary citizens given the dire
consequences such attacks leave in their wake. Punch newspaper led
these reports with its alarming report on 10 May 2008 titled 'Al-Qaeda
plans to bomb Nigeria –Okiro'. Although the alleged warning was swiftly
denied by the police boss, the media reports and the alleged Al-Qaeda
threat warning were resoundingly condemned by Muslim leaders across the
country, and justifiably so (Adegbite, others slam Okiro, The Nation
newspaper, Monday 19th May, 2008). These reports which have no basis in
genuine concern for safety, welfare or national security amounted to
one of the worst forms of Islamophobic scaremongering in recent time.
At least one subsequent report has since indicated that the Police set
up an anti-terrorism squad in some states ('Police deploy
anti-terrorist squads in Lagos, FCT, others': Punch Newspaper, 14 May,
2008) headed by a police officer that had received training in the
United States in ‘detection of weapons of mass destruction’, the whole
issue on which an epic man-made disaster- called Iraq war- is based!
But what else has the US been teaching our security and intelligence
personnel? Given America’s own terrible records on inhuman treatment
and physical torture of prisoners as it has done in Abu Ghraib and
Guantanamo prisons where more than 37 people were tortured to death by
US interrogators in Abu Ghraib alone, along with the participation of
medical personnel and 23 inmates attempted suicide at Guantanamo Bay
due to torture on inmates, regular sexual humiliation and solitary
confinement for over 3 years (http://www.salon.com/news/abu
_ghraib/2006/03/14/introductio
n/index.html).
Has the US been teaching our security agencies that torture is right
and killing innocent civilians in cold blood is acceptable as
collateral damage? That the end always justifies the means. It is very
clear to even the optimists of the militant US foreign policy and
anti-terrorism tactics that the US is not spreading democracy and
freedom, nor respecting human rights and international conventions on
the treatment of prisoners and detainees; they are simply using violent
means to spread conformity with their world view.
If indeed the international terrorist group called Al-Qaeda- an
organization paid for and trained by the America's CIA, founded and
sustained when America was belly rubbing its leaders during the cold
war- has threatened to send time bomb to Nigeria, this may be because
America has sent hundreds of Nigerians to fight its illegal war in
Iraq. This is a crucial fact and visible connection that all the papers
that breathlessly reported the alleged Police warning tragically
avoided in their reports. Earlier reports had indicated that hundreds
of Nigerians residing in the US have joined the US Army (The Sun
Newspaper, Thursday, March 20, 2008) and have since been sent to Iraq
killing and in danger of being killed. This is how Nigerians could be
perceived by any terrorist organisation present in Iraq that Nigerians
are somehow complicit in the violent occupation of that country, in the
rape of Iraqi daughters and women, and in the torture and murder of
their men at Abu Grahib and many other torture dungeons that America
operates in its numerous black sites (http://www.mpac-ng.org/archive
/black-sites.php).
Could this be the motivation, even if not the right justification, for
Al-Qaeda to plan to send time bombs to us? If infact such threat
exists, it would simply follow America own example when it sent, not
few time bombs, but hundreds of thousands of soldiers, warships and
other deadly chemical and weapons of mass destruction to Afghanistan.
Yet the Bush administration justification for raining deaths down on a
whole country was a crime its own reports confirm were allegedly
carried out by individuals not in the name of any nation, creed or
value.
America leads other nations in monitoring and controlling the
activities of most nations’ intelligence services through overt and
covert operations- spying on nations including those it considers its
friends and allies and manipulating intelligence information for both
domination and control. With our armed forces already being swamped by
the American military experts and ‘peace-keeping trainers’ courtesy of
a visionless policy of the last regime that threw widely open our
national security to America’s manipulation and control (Nigeria: Why
US Wants to Establish Military Base in the Country, Daily Trust
Newspaper, 24 November 2007: http://www.mpac- ng.org/archive/
military- command-base. php), we should be afraid of those that feed us
constant stream of lies of imminent terrorist’s attacks to ensure that
the eye of the public is on a so called “Islamist Al-Qaeda threat to
the world”. In the interview, the former Chief of Army Staff, General
Victor Malu had instructively stated as follows: “Why America would
choose to come and train Nigeria that provided the cream of the
peace-keepers? It didn't take anybody with analytical mind before they
know what the Americans wanted. Any other person would have told them
thank you, but we don't give our intelligence or armed forces on a
silver plate. In the case of America in particular, America has never
done anything for any country because they like the country. They look
at what they will benefit out of it.” In America today, blind ignorant
hate against Muslims has been brought to a boiling point. The fear and
loathing is so great that the American public and its elected
representatives in Congress offer scant opposition to the Bush
administration' s plan to make Iran the third Middle East victim of
American aggression in the 21st century.
In the US it is acceptable, even obligatory in many circles, to hate
Muslims and to support violence against them. Leading anti-Muslim hate
propagandists have been presented in the US media and appointed to
Government institutions as experts on Muslim/Middle- Eastern issues and
these are people whose opinions are often classified as credible
military intelligence fed into foreign countries’ intelligence
machines. People that are on record advocating the use of violence
alone as the solution to the problems involving Muslims. However, the
Muslim world is disunited at the moment to be a credible source of
major threat to the progress and propagation of the agenda and
worldview of a rapacious empire and its neo-con actors. When the facts
are considered- Muslim disunity is the only major setback that
continues to pave way for the relentless attack on Muslim nations and
the paralyzing weakness of most others. Bought-and-paid-for American
puppets rule Egypt, Jordan, and Pakistan. Shia Iran, the current focus
of America's demonization, has aligned itself to a waning superpower
for military protection and and as a survival strategy as the horror an
unprovoked US aggression against the Islamic republic mounts,
unprovoked aggression that is aided and abetted by some surrounding
paranoia Sunni Muslim nations. The rulers of Saudi Arabia and the oil
emirates are Sunni Arabs. They are more afraid of Shi'ite Arabs living
even amongst them than of Zionists that have sworn to destroy them
altogether- both Sunni and Shi’ite. In Iraq most of the fighting and
unabated violence is between Sunni and Shi'ite Arabs and between Sunnis
and Kurds. America sees to this and fans the ember of sectarianism that
sustains the violence. Just imagine if Iraqis were unified as a nation
of one people, most of the violence, instead of a small part of it,
would be directed against the American troops, and the remnants of a US
defeated army would have been withdrawn by now. However much Iraqis
might hate the American invader and occupier, they do not hate him
enough to unite and to drive him out. They had rather kill one another
instead.
So, the warning of time bomb threat at this time and the reckless haste
with which it was reported did not occur in isolation. It followed a
News Agency of Nigeria news bulletin in November 2007 which quoted the
Acting Director General of the State Security Services (SSS), Mr
Afakriya Gadzama, that his organization had averted a terrorist attack
in the country by several Muslim militants. When newspapers report on
such threats in the manner they have carried on are we supposed to just
be afraid, or a little bit more afraid than yesterday? All these
carefully timed reports are supposed to imply a deeply-felt concern
about the welfare and safety of the Nigerian people, or the interest of
our national security, but what else could they mean? Napoleon said
that to understand a country's policy, one has only to look at the map.
To better understand the effects created by the incessant warnings and
alerts, one only needs to look at the source of the intelligence that
drives the warnings, the alerts and ultimately the stressful rise and
fall of FEAR. The fear mongering of the Bush administration and the
right wing media pundits who make a living from demonizing Muslims and
Arabs have inundated people with images of the violent Muslims bent on
death and destruction. For media outlets like Fox Television, MSNBC,
CNN, Sky News and other networks on which most Nigerian media outlets
rely to source international news, it is a way to sell their
sensationalist news programmes and for the Bush administration, a way
to sell its wars. It can be said that when the US goes to war, so does
the media. During the Iraq invasion embedded reporters took this to
another level. In the lead up to both Iraq wars, the news became a
thinly veiled advertisement for the war with emphasis on military
technology and digital graphics, removing the viewer far from the human
devastation that is caused by these wars. Even the titles of news
programs were temporarily changed to things like, “Showdown with
Saddam” or “The Hunt for Osama”. So, when the rabidly irresponsible
section of the media rely wholly on highly politicized and militarized
foreign media sources and our intelligence service is run as an
offshoot of an organization that works day and night to demonize and
destroy any world view different than theirs, they should be aware that
what they are buying is like a cigarette pack without the necessary
health warning!
Although most Americans have been brainwashed to believe that Muslims
"hate us for our freedom and democracy," only a small war-mongering
minority wish to sacrifice their fellow citizens' lives to evil agenda.
These ideological driven men and women have hijacked democracy over the
years. These men and women are famously known in America as
neo-conservatives. In short they have hijacked democracy for their own
narrow agenda. American men and women are dying and will continue to
die on foreign shores for the interests of these neo-con Zionists. The
US is bogged down in Iraq and retreat has become a distant dream. It
has burdened the US economy with more war sustaining expenses and
thereby increasing its national debt that is already paying 237 billion
Dollar interest on debt servicing, and it has driven the public rating
of its militant, Supreme Court appointed president, to the rock bottom (http://www.pollingreport.com
/BushJob.htm).
Disu Kamor
Director of Media & Communications
Muslim Public Affairs Centre, MPAC, Nigeria
e-mail: kamor.disu@mpacng. org
website: www.mpac-ng. org
|
# 
Your Comments
Please make The Square an enjoyable experience for everyone by refraining from gratuitous ad-hominem contributions, defamatory comments and off-topic posting. Such posts will be removed.