He Didn’t Say 'Infidels': Homeland Security Theater, Continued

by William Norman Grigg

Recently by William Norman Grigg: 'What Were You Guys Thinking? Why Did You Kill Him?'

The word has a very distinct connotation. There's nothing else that quite captures it.... Give me one word that captures the same image. One word. You name it, and I will use it.

~ Defense attorney Robin Weathers arguing for the admissibility of a profoundly vulgar epithet involving the emunctory orifice in the film From the Hip.

A few months after Iraqi national Waad Ramadan Alwan was allowed to immigrate to the U.S. as a refugee, he found himself unwittingly cast in a leading role in yet another installment of Homeland Security Theater. 

Someone identified in the criminal complaint as a "Confidential Human Source" (CHS) in the FBI's employ – that is, a bit player from the Bureau's large and ever-expanding troupe of agent provocateurs and "terrorism facilitators" – approached then-28-year-old Alwan to recruit him into an effort to aid mujahadeen fighters in Iraq.

The script written by the Louisville Joint Terrorism Task Force called for the FBI's asset to pose as a representative of an unnamed "Hajii" with connections to Iraqi insurgents. After Alwan had been lured into the pseudo-plot, the role-playing stooge added a final decorative detail by claiming that he received money from Osama bin Laden – a claim that neither impressed nor interested the Iraqi, according to the account provided in the criminal complaint.

The Bureau's bit player proposed that Alwan, who had taken up residence in Bowling Green, Kentucky, help train Iraqi insurgents in the manufacture and use of IEDs, and assist in smuggling weapons and a large amount of money to Iraq.

Alwan was let into the country in April 2009. A few weeks later, 21-year-old Iraqi

Mohanad Shareef Hammadi, who would be recruited by Alwan into the federally-choreographed "conspiracy," arrived in the U.S. The FBI operation began just a few weeks later after Alwan's arrival. The criminal complaint against Alwan states that he began "notionally assisting" the supposed plot "beginning in 2010."

At least 19,000 Iraqi refugees were admitted to the United States that year; why was Alwan of particular interest to the Bureau? One possible answer is found in the fact that Alwan, a one-time employee at an electrical plant in Bayji, was a known insurgent.

From 2003-2006 Alwan took part in a number of ambushes involving IEDs, and was arrested by security personnel after one operation went awry. His fingerprints had been found on a wireless telephone base station used in an IED that failed to go off. That dud IED was found by occupation forces in September 2005.

Federal prosecutors have charged Alwan and Hammadi with several crimes – including "Conspiracy to Use a Weapon of Mass Destruction," a category of armaments that includes any destructive device, no matter how trivial its yield, fashioned by anybody other that the United States government. The prosecutors refuse to say why the two Iraqis were let into the country, whether Alwan's arrest in Iraq was known to federal officials, or what prompted the Bureau to target them for a "sting" operation. 

Res ipsa loquitir: Alwan and Hammadi were allowed to enter the U.S. for the precise purpose of being lured into an FBI false flag operation. That conclusion is suggested by the circumstantial evidence in this specific case, and justified by the fact that every significant "terrorist plot" supposedly disrupted by the FBI since 9/11 has been a Federal Government production. 

In making its pitch to potential patsies, the FBI is too smart to appeal to the seething hatred of all infidels that supposedly festers inside every young Muslim male. Instead, they exploit the perfectly understandable and thoroughly human resentment provoked by Washington's invasion and occupation of Muslim countries. 

Were Peter King – former fundraiser for the most violent faction of the terrorist IRA – an honest man rather than a feckless demagogue, his hearings regarding the "radicalization of American Muslims" would focus on the unparalleled success enjoyed by the FBI in recruiting once-peaceable Muslim men into ersatz terrorist plots. The Bureau has isolated a formula that works: Rather than trying to rile up Muslims over the decadence of American culture and the general impudence of the infidels, FBI-trained provocateurs focus instead on the horrific human cost of Washington's foreign policy.

In the case of Alwan and Hammadi, the Regime was given the gift of two young Iraqi males who had already been pre-radicalized as a result of their life experiences. 

Alwan was born in 1981 – the year after Saddam Hussein, in his role as Washington's regional subcontractor, began his war with Iran – with Washington's covert encouragement and material assistance. Alwan was still in diapers when the Reagan administration removed Saddam's government from the roster of terrorism-supporting regimes, which permitted Washington to begin plying Baghdad with military and financial aid.

When Alwan was two years old, Donald Rumsfeld visited Baghdad as a presidential emissary, laden with promises of subsidies, military aid, and other forms of material and moral support. This included transfers of dual-use technology to Iraqi nuclear facilities, and tacit support for Iraq's development and use of chemical weapons (even though Washington acknowledged that this would provoke Iran to expand its own use of chemical munitions).

In 1984, when Alwan was a toddler, President Reagan issued National Security Decision Directive 139, which made preventing the "collapse" of Saddam's abominable police state a strategic priority.

Although  – or, perhaps, because – the war turned out disastrously for Iraq, Saddam continued to be a specially favored beneficiary of Washington's imperial largesse until literally the eve of the 1991 Persian Gulf War. During the 12-year intermission in the Persian Gulf war, Washington imposed a deadly embargo that further entrenched Saddam's rule while consigning hundreds of thousands of young Iraqis – many of them Alwan's age – to an early death through avoidable illness or starvation. 

Like millions of other Iraqis of the same age, Alwan has no memory of a time when his country wasn't either at war with Washington, or involved in a war as a result of Washington's chicanery. During the 1990s, his country was ravaged by a murderous embargo that was punctuated with airstrikes and missile assaults, even as Washington very thoughtfully cattle-penned Saddam's domestic opposition and allowed the dictator to slaughter them (something made clear in the account offered by former CIA operative Robert Baer).

Alwan was 22 years old when the distant government that had visited such favors on his country invaded Iraq to remove the middleman. In a fit of ingratitude that would be inexplicable to neo-conservatives and others unfamiliar with the rudiments of human motivation, Alwan was among those who chose to greet the "liberators" with IEDs and high-velocity rounds fired from a sniper rifle, rather than flowers and sweets. 

The people on the receiving end of Alwan's attacks were Americans. They should not have been there. They had no right to be there, and no authority – moral or legal – to employ violence to force Iraqis like Alwan to submit to them. The policymakers who sent them to Iraq, thereby putting them in a morally untenable and physically vulnerable position, are criminals who should be put in the dock for mass murder and crimes against the Constitution. 

 The grand jury indictment against Alwan accuses him of conspiring to murder "United States nationals outside the United States" by using "weapons of mass destruction" – that is, crude, low-yield IEDs. 

The sight of an American who has been maimed, blinded, or killed by an IED set by an Iraqi insurgent is unbearable, and this moral conclusion is just as unavoidable: The people who set that charge aren't terrorists; they're patriots fighting on their home soil against a prohibitively stronger foreign aggressor. If America were on the receiving end of a similar "liberation," American patriots would provide a similar welcome to our uninvited benefactors. 

In a typically onanistic and self-congratulatory statement announcing the arrests of Alwan and Hammadi, David J. Hale, U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Kentucky, said that the Feds are prepared "to pursue terrorists wherever in the United States they may be found.... Whether they seek shelter in a major metropolitan area or in a smaller city in Kentucky, those who would attempt to harm or kill Americans abroad will face a determined and prepared law enforcement effort ... to bring them to justice." (Emphasis added.) 

Note well that these two purported terrorists were not accused of plotting to kill unsuspecting Americans anywhere within the United States; they were allegedly plotting to kill the heavily armed, well-protected military personnel who still occupy their home country. If they had been consumed by an unconquerable desire to smite the American infidels wherever they could be found, they had no shortage of opportunities here.

In any case, rather than congratulating the Feds for their vigilance, we should be demanding to know why they knowingly permitted Alwan, a purported mass murder, into the country to begin with. After all, isn't the supposed purpose of occupying Iraq to "fight them there, so we don't have to fight them here"? But, once again, the critical fact is that these Iraqis had no interest in pursuing vengeance against Americans who are simply minding our own business.

As one telling exchange with the FBI's agent provocateur illustrates, Alwan didn't lavish hostility on all infidels, or even on Americans in general; instead, he apparently focused it on a small, selective sub-population.

During a meeting last November 8, according to the criminal complaint, the FBI's undercover asset told Alwan "to pick up weapons from a storage facility, place them in bags, and deliver them" to a waiting vehicle. 

"You will be shocked with the RPGs," the provocateur boasted. "It is almost like you see in the movies."

"Yes, the a**holes built it?" Alwan inquired, prompting the FBI's stooge to reply, "Yeah, yeah – it is American."

That epithet, once again, wasn't "infidels." It's also pretty clear that Alwan wasn't applying that insult to Americans in general, but rather to those he blamed for turning his country into a perpetual spectacle of violence, disease, terror, and tyranny.  Why wouldn't he perceive such people as – well, you know...?

Every human being has the potential to earn that designation, and nearly all of us qualify at some point in our lives. Government, said James Madison, is the "largest of all reflections on human nature." Given that the behavior of human beings invested with power is invariably asinine rather than angelic, Madison's metaphor would work better if it employed a proctoscope, rather than a mirror. 

If I take his meaning correctly, Alwan wasn't even necessarily referring to the foreign troops occupying his country, but rather to the craven and despicable policymakers who had sent them there, and the corporatist parasites who profit from State-orchestrated bloodshed – which includes the death and dismemberment of American troops sent somewhere they didn't belong to carry out a mission they shouldn't have been given against a population that never harmed or threatened us in any way.

In describing people capable of orchestrating atrocities of that kind, there simply isn't a suitable substitute for the expression Alwan employed.

June 3, 2011

William Norman Grigg [send him mail] publishes the Pro Libertate blog and hosts the Pro Libertate radio program.

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