The USA’s government developed the bad habit of calling any explosive capable of killing and or hurting more than one person “Weapon of Mass destruction.” Remember Abdulmutallab; the Nigerian boy who hid explosives no bigger than firecrackers in his brief so ridiculously funny…he burned only his crotch (b*lls) and yet the government charged him with possession of weapons of mass destruction and sentenced him to 3 life sentences if I remember correctly. Experts admitted that even if the boy were able to fully detonate his firecracker sized explosives; it would have not hurt anyone in the plane but himself nor bring down the plane as a result. If a single stick of dynamite or a piece of hand grenade can be classified as weapons of mass destruction then what is USA waiting for; bomb every non-ally nation to smithereens for the possession of weapons of mass destruction.
America: The World’s Number One Sponsor Of Terrorism
By Garikai Chengu
By Garikai Chengu
April 23, 2013 "Information Clearing House" - Just as there are good dictators and bad dictators in Washington’s eyes, there are also good terrorists and bad terrorists: Al Qaeda in Iraq, bad. Al Qaeda in Syria, good. Al Qaeda in Mali, bad. Al Qaeda in Libya, good, now bad. This hypocrisy manifests itself most acutely in how western media reports on the victims of terror. On the same day as the recent Boston bombings, at least 75 people were killed in Iraq and more than 250 injured by a series of car bombs.
Al Qaeda in Iraq has claimed responsibility for the car bombings and within minutes of the bombings in Boston, western media outlets, politicians and security experts all hastily concluded that Islamic terror was to blame. This is despite the fact that according to the FBI only 6% of terror attacks on US soil are by Muslims. In fact, Jewish extremists committed more terror attacks in the US than Muslims over the last three decades. Yet notice the disparity in media coverage between the two.
Quite aside from creating more terrorists than it kills, America’s war on terror also has the unintended consequence of slowly but surely bankrupting the nation. Terrorist attacks on US soil embolden the right wing elements of the military industrial complex and the resulting military actions by these right wing elements embolden terrorists further. It is this vicious cycle of war and terror that future historians may well consider to be one of the key elements that precipitated the decline of the great capitalist American Empire. Adam Smith, the grandfather of capitalism was a staunch anti-imperialist. He argued that imperialism is costly and eventually bankrupts the country. In fact, one year of the US military budget is equal to more than $20,000 per hour for every hour since Jesus Christ was born.
Can an act of violence be called 'terrorism' if the motive is unknown?
By Glenn Greenwald
April 23, 2013 "Information Clearing House" -"The Guardian" - Two very disparate commentators, Ali Abunimah and Alan Dershowitz, both raised serious questions over the weekend about a claim that has been made over and over about the bombing of the Boston Marathon: namely, that this was an act of terrorism. Dershowitz was on BBC Radio on Saturday and, citing the lack of knowledge about motive, said (at the 3:15 mark): "It's not even clear under the federal terrorist statutes that it qualifies as an act of terrorism."
Abunimah wrote a superb analysisof whether the bombing fits the US government's definition of "terrorism", noting that "absolutely no evidence has emerged that the Boston bombing suspects acted 'in furtherance of political or social objectives'" or that their alleged act was 'intended to influence or instigate a course of action that furthers a political or social goal.'" Even a former CIA Deputy Director, Phillip Mudd, said on Fox News on Sunday that at this point the bombing seems more like a common crime than an act of terrorism.
Over the last two years, the US has witnessed at least three other episodes of mass, indiscriminate violence that killed more people than the Boston bombings did: the Tucson shooting by Jared Loughner in which 19 people (including Rep. Gabrielle Giffords) were shot, six of whom died; the Aurora movie theater shooting by James Holmes in which 70 people were shot, 12 of whom died; and the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting by Adam Lanza in which 26 people (20 of whom were children) were shot and killed. The word "terrorism" was almost never used to describe that indiscriminate slaughter of innocent people, and none of the perpetrators of those attacks was charged with terrorism-related crimes. A decade earlier, two high school seniors in Colorado, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, used guns and bombs to murder 12 students and a teacher, and almost nobody called that "terrorism" either.
By Timothy Noah
April 23, 2013 "Information Clearing House" -"Foreign Policy" An 11-page federal criminal complaint charges Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving alleged Boston Marathon bomber, with "unlawfully using and conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction ... against persons and property." The WMD in question was, the document explains, "an improvised explosive device."
Give me a break. Even granting that the language of the law is not the same as the language of everyday speech, it's ridiculous to call the bombs that went off in Boston "weapons of mass destruction." If any old bomb can be called a WMD, then Saddam most definitely had WMDs before the United States invaded Iraq 10 years ago. And if an IED is a WMD, then Iraq actually ended up with more WMDs after the U.S. invasion than before (and isn't entirely rid of them yet).
No one minds the hyperbole when it comes to the Boston attacks because the perpetrators of this crime committed an unusually gruesome murder. But the term "WMD" also applies to international relations. Mere possession of WMDs has, in the recent past, been used to justify invading a country and overthrowing its leader. Does the United States really want to put on notice every nation whose military arsenal includes bombs, grenades, and/or mines that they could be next? If we did, our only allies might end up being Andorra, Lichtenstein, Monaco, and the Vatican. (How many WMDs does the pope have?)
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