Introduction<\/b><\/p>\n
Two major terrorists\u2019 attacks took place almost simultaneously:\u00a0 in Boston, two alleged Chechen terrorists set off bombs during the annual Boston Marathon killing three people and injuring 170; in Venezuela, terrorist-supporters of defeated presidential candidate, Henrique Capriles, assassinated 8 and injured 70 supporters of victorious Socialist Party candidate Nicolas Maduro, in the course of firebombing 8 health clinics and several Party offices and homes.\u00a0 In the case of Boston, the terrorist spree resulted in one further fatality \u2013 one of the perpetrators; in Venezuela, some of the terrorists are under arrest but their political mentors are still free and active \u2013 in fact they are now presented as \u2018victims of repression\u2019\u00a0 by the US media.<\/p>\n
By examining the context, politics, government responses and mass media treatment of these terrorist acts we can gain insight into the larger meaning of terrorism and how it reflects, not merely the hypocrisy of the US government and mass media, but the underlying politics that encourages terrorism.<\/p>\n
Context of Terrorism:\u00a0 From Chechnya to Boston :\u00a0 A Dangerous Game<\/b><\/p>\n
Chechnya has been an armed battleground for over two decades pitting the secular Russian State against local Muslim fundamentalist separatists.\u00a0 Washington , fresh from arming and financing Muslim jihadis in a successful war against the secular Soviet-backed Afghan regime in the 1980\u2019s, expanded its aid program into Central Asian and Caucasian Muslim regions of the former Soviet Union .<\/p>\n
Russian military might ultimately defeated the Chechen warlords but many of their armed followers fled to other countries, joining armed, extremist, Islamist groups in Iraq , Pakistan , Afghanistan and later Egypt , Libya and now Syria .\u00a0 While accepting Western, especially US arms, to fight secular adversaries of the US Empire, the jihadis\u2019 ultimate goal has been a clerical (Islamic) regime.\u00a0 Washington and the Europeans have played a dangerous game:\u00a0 using Muslim fundamentalists as shock troops to defeat secular nationalists, while planning to dump them in favor of neo-liberal \u2018moderate\u2019 Muslim or secular client regimes afterwards.<\/p>\n
This cynical policy has backfired everywhere \u2013 including in the US .\u00a0 Fundamentalists in Afghanistan took state power after the Soviets pulled out.\u00a0 They opposed the US , which invaded Afghanistan after the attacks of September 11, 2001, and have successfully engaged in a 12 year war of attrition with Washington and NATO, spawning powerful allies in Pakistan and elsewhere.\u00a0 Taliban-controlled areas of Afghanistan serve as training bases and a \u2018beacon\u2019 for terrorists the world over.<\/p>\n
The US invasion of Iraq and overthrow of President Saddam Hussein led to ten years of Al Qaeda and related-clerical terrorism in Iraq , wiping out the entire secular society.\u00a0 In the case of Libya and Syria , NATO and Gulf State arms have greatly expanded the arsenals of terrorist fundamentalists in North and Sub-Sahara Africa and the Middle East .\u00a0 Western-sponsored fundamentalist terrorists were directly related to the perpetrators of the 9\/11 attacks on New York and Washington and there is little doubt that the recent actions of the Chechen bombers in Boston are products of this latest upsurge of NATO-backed fundamentalist advances in North Africa and the Middle East.<\/p>\n
But against all the evidence to the contrary, Chechen terrorists are viewed by the White House as \u201cfreedom fighters\u201d engaged in liberating their country from the secular Russians \u2026 Perhaps after the Boston terror attack, that appraisal will change.<\/p>\n
Venezuela : Presenting Terrorism as \u201cPeaceful Dissent\u201d<\/b><\/p>\n
The candidate of the US backed and financed opposition,\u00a0Henrique Capriles, has lived up to his reputation for violent politics.\u00a0 In the run-up to his failed candidacy in the Venezuelan presidential election on April 15, his followers sabotaged power lines causing frequent national blackouts.\u00a0 His supporters among the elite hoarded basic consumer items, causing shortages, and repeatedly threatened violence if the election went against them.<\/p>\n
With over 100 international observers from the United Nations, European Commission and the Jimmy Carter Center there to\u00a0certify the Venezuelan elections, Capriles and his inner circle unleashed their street gangs, who proceeded to target Socialist voters, campaign workers, health clinics, newly-built low-income housing projects and Cuban doctors and nurses.<\/p>\n
The \u201cwhite terror\u201d resulted in 8 deaths and 70 injuries.\u00a0 Over 135 right-wing street thugs were arrested and 90 were charged with felonies, conspiracy to commit murder and destroy public property.\u00a0 Capriles, violent political credentials go back at least a decade earlier when he played a major role in the bloody coup which briefly overthrew \u00a0President Hugo Chavez in 2002.\u00a0 Capriles led a gang of armed thugs and assaulted the Cuban embassy, \u2018arresting\u2019 legitimate Cabinet ministers who had taken refuge.\u00a0 After a combined military and popular mass movement restored President Chavez, Capriles was placed under arrest for violence and treason.\u00a0 The courageous Venezuelan Attorney General, Danilo Anderson, was in the process of prosecuting Capriles and several hundred of his terrorist supporters when he was assassinated by a car bomb \u2013 planted by supporters of the failed coup.<\/p>\n
Though Capriles electoral propaganda was given a face-lift \u2013 he even called himself a candidate of the \u201ccenter-left\u201d and a supporter of several of President Chavez\u2019s \u201csocial missions\u201d, his close ties with\u00a0terrorist operatives were revealed by his call for violent action as soon as his electoral defeat was announced.\u00a0 His thinly veiled threat to organize a \u201cmass march\u201d and seize the headquarters of the electoral offices was only called off when the government ordered the National Guard and the Armed Forces on high alert.\u00a0 Clearly Capriles\u2019 terror tactics were only pulled back in the face of greater force.\u00a0 When the legal order decided to defend democracy and not yield to terrorist blackmail, Capriles temporarily suspended violent activity and regrouped his forces, allowing the legal-electoral face of his movement to come to the fore.<\/p>\n
Responses to Terror:\u00a0 Boston and Venezuela<\/b><\/p>\n
In response to the terrorist incident in Boston, the local, state and federal police were mobilized and literally shut down the entire city and its transport networks and went on a comprehensive and massive \u2018manhunt\u2019:\u00a0 the mass media and the entire population were transformed into tools of a police state investigation.\u00a0 Entire blocks and neighborhoods were scoured as thousands of heavily armed police and security forces went house to house, room to room, dumpster to dumpster looking for a wounded 19 year old college freshman.\u00a0 A terror alert was raised for the entire country ad overseas police networks and intelligence agencies were involved in the search for the terrorist assassins.\u00a0 The media and the government constantly showed photos of the victims, emphasizing their horrific injuries and the gross criminality of the act:\u00a0 it was unthinkable to discuss any political dimensions to the act \u2013 it was presented, pure and simple, as an act of political terror directed at \u2018cowering the American people and their elected government\u2019.\u00a0 Every government official demanded that anyone, even remotely linked, to the crime or criminals face the full force of the law.<\/p>\n
On the other hand and coinciding with the attack in Boston, when the Venezuelan oppositionist terrorists launched their violent assault on the citizens and public institutions they were given unconditional support by the Obama regime, which claimed the killers were really \u2018democrats seeking to uphold free elections\u2019.\u00a0 Secretary of State Kerry refused to recognize the electoral victory of President Maduro. Despite the carnage, the Venezuelan government did not declare martial law: at most the National Guard and loyalist police upheld the law and arrested several dozen protestors and terrorists; many of the former \u2013 not directly linked to violence \u2013 were quickly released.\u00a0 Moreover, despite the internationally certified elections by over 100 observers, the Maduro government conceded the chief demand for an electoral recount \u2013 in the hope of averting further right-wing bloodshed.<\/p>\n
US Media Response<\/b><\/p>\n
All the major Western news agencies, including the principle \u2018respectable\u2019 print media (Financial Times, New York Times and Washington Post) converted the Venezuelan political assassins into \u2018peaceful protestors\u2019 who were victimized for attempting to register their dissent.\u00a0 In other words, Washington and the entire media came out in full force in favor of political terror perpetrated against an adversarial democratic government, while invoking a near-martial law state for a brutal, but limited, act of terror in the US .\u00a0 Washington apparently does not make the connection between its support of terrorism abroad and its spread to the US .<\/p>\n
The US media has blocked out discussion of the ties between Chechen terrorist front groups, based in the US and UK, and leading US neoconservatives and Zionists, including Rudolph Giuliani, Richard Perle, Kenneth Adleman, Elliott Abrams, Midge Dector, Frank Gaffney and R. James Woolsey \u2013 all leading members of the self-styled \u2018American Committee for Peace in Chechnya\u2019 (re-named Committee for Peace in the Caucasus after the horrific Beslan school massacre).\u00a0 These Washington luminaries are all full-throated supporters of the \u2018war on terror\u2019 or should we say supporters of \u2018terror and war\u2019 (\u201cChechen Terrorists and the Neocons\u201d by former FBI official Coleen Rowley 4\/19\/13).\u00a0 The headquarters and nerve center for many \u2018exile\u2019 Chechen leaders, long sought by Russian authorities for mass terrorist activities, is Boston, Massachusetts \u2013 the site of the bombing \u2013 another \u2018fact\u2019 thus far ignored by the FBI and the Justice Department, perhaps because of long-standing and on-going working relations in organizing terrorist incidents aimed at destabilizing Russia.<\/p>\n
Former Presidential candidate and New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, after the bombing, stated that Chechens \u2018were only focused (sic) on Russia \u2019 and not on the US (his Chechens perhaps).\u00a0 Interpol and US intelligence Agencies are well aware that Chechen militants have been involved in several Al Qaeda terrorist groups throughout South and Central Asia as well as the Middle East .\u00a0 The Russian government\u2019s specific inquiries regarding any number of suspected Chechen terrorists or fronts have been given short shrift \u2013 apparently including the activities of one Tamerlan Tsarnaev, recently deceased.<\/p>\n
(As a historical aside (and perhaps not unrelated), the Boston-based FBI was notorious from the 1970\u2019s through the 1990\u2019s for protecting a brutal gangster hit man, James \u2018Whitey\u2019 Bulger, as a privileged informant, while he murdered dozens of individuals in the New England area.)<\/p>\n
The Deeper Meaning of the War on Terrorism<\/p>\n
US support for Venezuelan terrorists and their political leader, Henrique Capriles, is part of a complex multi-track policy combining the exploitation of electoral processes and the clandestine funding of NGO\u2019s for \u201cgrass roots\u201d agitation of local grievances, together with support for \u2018direct action\u2019 including \u2018trial runs\u2019 of political violence against the symbols and institutions of social democracy.\u00a0\u00a0 The versatile Capriles is the perfect candidate to run in elections while orchestrating terror.\u00a0 Past US experience with political terror in Latin America has had a boomerang effect \u2013 as evident in the Miami-based Cuban terrorist engagement with numerous bombings, gun-running and drug trafficking within the USA, especially the 1976 car bombing assassination of the exile Chilean Minister Orlando Letelier and an American associate on Embassy Row in the heart of Washington, DC \u2013 an action never characterized as \u2018terrorism\u2019 because of official US ties to the perpetrators.<\/p>\n
Despite financial, political and military links between Washington and terrorists, especially fundamentalists, the latter retain their organizational autonomy and follow their own political-cultural agenda, which in most cases is hostile to the US .\u00a0 As far as the Chechens, the Afghans\u00a0and the Al Qaeda Syrians today are concerned, the US is a tactical ally to be discarded on the road to establishing independent fundamentalist states.\u00a0 We should add the scores of Boston victims to the thousands of US citizens killed in New York , Washington , Libya , Afghanistan and elsewhere by former fundamentalist\u00a0allies of the US .<\/p>\n
By siding with terrorists and their political spokespeople and refusing to recognize the validity of the elections in Venezuela , the Obama regime has totally alienated itself from all of South America and the Caribbean .\u00a0 By supporting \u00a0violent assaults against democratic institutions in Venezuela, \u00a0the White House is signaling to its clients in opposition to the governments of Argentina, Bolivia and Ecuador \u2013 that violent assaults against independent democratic governments is an acceptable road to restoring the neo-liberal order and US centered \u2018regional integration\u2019.<\/p>\n
Conclusion<\/b><\/p>\n
Washington has demonstrated no consistent opposition to terrorism \u2013 it depends on the political goals of the terrorists and on the target adversaries.\u00a0 In one of the two recent cases \u2013 the US government declared virtual \u201cmartial law\u201d on Boston to kill or capture two terrorists who had attacked US citizens in a single locale; whereas in the case of Venezuela , the Obama regime has given political and material support to terrorists in order to subvert the entire constitutional order and electoral regime.<\/p>\n
Because of the long-standing and deep ties between the US State Department,\u00a0prominent neo-con leaders and Zionist notables with Chechen terrorists, we cannot expect a thorough investigation which would surely embarrass or threaten the careers of the major US officials who have long-term working relations with such criminals.<\/p>\n
The White House will escalate and widen its support for the same Venezuelan terrorists who have sabotaged the electrical power system, the food supply and the constitutional electoral process of that country.\u00a0 Terror, in that context, serves as its launch pad for a full scale assault against the past decade\u2019s social advances under the late President Hugo Chavez.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, in order to cover-up the Chechen-Washington working alliance, the Boston Marathon bombing will be reduced to an isolated act by two misguided youths, lead astray by an anonymous fundamentalist website \u2013 their actions reduced to \u2018religious fundamentalism\u2019.\u00a0 And despite an economy in crisis, tens of billions of more dollars will be allocated to expand the police state at home, citing its effectiveness and efficiency in the aftermath of the bombings while secretly sending more millions to foment \u2018democratic\u2019 terror\u2026in Venezuela .<\/p>\n
______________________<\/p>\n
James Petras is a Bartle Professor (Emeritus) of Sociology at Binghamton University, New York. He is the author of more than 62 books published in 29 languages, and over 600 articles in professional journals. He has a long history of commitment to social justice, working in particular with the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement for 11 years. In 1973-76 he was a member of the Bertrand Russell Tribunal on Repression in Latin America. He writes a monthly column for the Mexican newspaper, La Jornada, and previously, for the Spanish daily, El Mundo. He received his B.A. from Boston University and Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley.<\/em><\/p>\n