Moscow’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) claimed in February that the US has recruited Islamist extremists to carry out terrorist attacks against Russia and other former Soviet republics. These militants are being trained at the Al-Tanf American military base in Syria, according to the SVR. If true, this wouldn’t be the first time that the US military has deployed terrorist proxies against those countries the US deems adversaries. Wikipedia defines terrorism as “the use of criminal violence to provoke a state of terror or fear, mostly with the intention to achieve political or religious aims.” The actions of the CIA, which routinely flout international law in pursuit of geopolitical aims, arguably meet this definition.
in Latin America, a Red Scare mixed with the Monroe Doctrine has been a particularly deadly combination. In 1976, counterrevolutionary Cuban exiles linked to the CIA bombed Cubana de Aviación Flight 455. The terrorist attack killed 73 people, including the entire Cuban national fencing team, leaving no survivors. The organization responsible for bombing Flight 455 as well as hotels in Cuba in 1997, Coordination of United Revolutionary Organizations, was founded by anti-Castro exile and CIA operative Luis Posada Carriles. The series of bomb attacks aimed to disrupt the Cuban tourism industry and de-legitimize the country’s revolutionary Communist government. Another infamous case of CIA-backed counterrevolutionary terrorism in Latin America involved the Contras, anti-government rebels in Nicaragua, illegally armed and funded by the Reagan administration. In 1986, the International Court of Justice ruled that US support for the Contras had violated international law and ordered that Washington cease all support.
For many Americans, terrorism brings to mind the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, a crisis the US ruling class exploited to manufacture consent for the PATRIOT Act and so-called “war on terror.” The CIA blamed al-Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden for September 11th, conveniently omitting its own checkered past working with Bin Laden. In 1979, the CIA launched Operation Cyclone to fund and arm the Mujahideen of Afghanistan to fight the Soviet Union, which had intervened in the country to defend the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. Bin Laden joined the Mujahideen forces to recruit, finance, and train Islamist extremists in Afghanistan to kill Soviets.
“We know of their deep belief in God, and we are confident their struggle will succeed. That land over there is yours, you’ll go back to it one day because your fight will prevail, and you’ll have your homes and your mosques back again. Because your cause is right and God is on your side.”
– Zbigniew Brzezinski, speaking to Mujahideen “freedom fighters”
Document leaks such as WikiLeaks’ Iraq War Logs and the New York Times’ Civilian Casualty Files demonstrated the world that the US regularly sided with terror in its “War on Terror.” According to these leaks, the US military killed tens of thousands of civilians in Iraq and Syria and ignored reports of acts of torture and murder by Iraqi police and soldiers.
While the occasional civilian casualty may be claimed to be unintentional, in numerous cases such murders were deliberate. One grisly example was the Haska Meyna wedding party airstrike, when the US military acting under the Bush administration bombed the same wedding procession in Afghanistan twice, killing 39 women and children. Of course, the killing of children continued under the Obama and Trump administrations, including a 16-year-old American civilian in Yemen and then his 8-year-old sister.
Anything was considered fair game to get revenge for 9/11. Despite the claim of a war on terror, terrorist groups have flourished as US seeks to use them to destabilize any country perceived as a threat to US unipolar hegemony. Given the atrocities described here and that the US military has been backing fascist Banderites in Kiev, one is tempted to agree with US drone operator Brandon Bryant’s description of the US military as “worse than the Nazis.”
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