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Creating terrorism



Glenn Greenwald on Salon:

"On Wednesday, I was on Cenk Uygur’s Current TV show with Michael Hastings discussing the Yemen bomb plot, and the video of that seven-minute segment is below. The discussion focused on the way in which U.S. “counter-Terrorism” policy in Yemen causes the very Terrorism it ostensibly seeks to battle. Yesterday, The Washington Post reported on several U.S. attacks in Yemen from this week alone and noted: “The latest strikes, aimed at al-Qaeda operatives in southern Yemen, bring the total this year to at least 15, about as many as in the previous 10 years combined“; just this morning, 17 more people were killed by U.S. airstrikes in Southern Yemen. The Obama administration recently leaked that it was escalating its attacks in Yemen to target those who names it does not know — not only with drones but also from the sea — and The Nation‘s Jeremy Scahill wrote this week that still more escalation is likely: “It seems there’s going to be a pretty serious, widespread bombing campaign with ground support in southern Yemen very soon.”

As I did this segment, I actually thought about how complete is the media suppression of the question of what causes Yemenis to want to attack the U.S. Extensive establishment media coverage has been devoted over the last few weeks to Yemen, and almost nobody in those discussions ever raises the question of why some people in Yemen might support such attacks. If you think about it, it’s really quite an impressive propaganda feat. It’s just natural for people who are targeted with violence to wonder what is motivating the attackers — recall the “Why-Do-They-Hate-Us?” bafflement in the wake of 9/11 — and yet that question has been almost entirely disappeared from establishment media discourse."

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