This kid may be a cold-blooded killer, the world will never know, but Mohamed Osman Mohamud will forever be seen as one, never will he be seen as a victim in this sham we call American Justice--he's the criminal for us still triumphantly (for now) safe to stare at mercilessly--but as with any unacknowledged crime, there's plenty of unacknowledged suffering to go around. This kid, for his decisions, whatever they were which landed him where he is, will suffer. The Muslim and Somali communities will suffer--but they will be aware of their sufferings, and healing may someday be theirs, redemption and salvation are not absent from their horizon . . . It is disappearing from ours. For it is we, the American people, who failed Mohamed Osman Mohamud, who gave him absolutely no reason not to hate the United States, or her citizens too willingly undereducated to find his war-torn nation on a map. Within a room of avowed nonconformists, a friend and I asked the group who among them knew upon which continent Somalia was located. One feeble "Africa?" was muttered hesitantly, followed by a more confident utterance of "Indochina?" We, who refer to our president as "The Leader of the Free World,' who know so little of our own history, let alone anyone else's. Let alone the fact that history, as the modern world defines it, is nothing more than the history of war, as it's been told by war's winners, the biggest of which has been war itself . . . It's all dismissed as inevitable, as human nature, as necessary, as moral even, under some warped, yet infinite faith in a Darwinian notion of survival of the fittest, in which fittest, quickly comes to represent nothing more than the superiority of wealth and weaponry. Might makes right, a moral code dictated by scientists of war, the Golden Rule in which whoever has the gold, rules . . .
An entire protocol of vast injustice is being administered amid the rejection of the unassailable axiom that violence begets violence , that chickens eventually come home to roost, that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. Why recruit this kid fresh out of high school? Why not monitor him, to determine the degree to which actual terrorist groups may be operating within the United States, groups which, if existent, would by definition, make searching out kids like Mohamud their top priority . . . and if no such network exists, for if it did, one would have to believe the Feds have eliminated it, if they have time to recruit jihadist cadets, there must not be a jihadist army to disarm.
The piece published in today's Willamette Week: "Bomb Plot Fallout: Five Things You Should Know After the Arrest in Pioneer Courthouse Square," was far more evenhandedly objective than anything I read about it on the AP or Reuters wires. It provides some details from "the 36-page affidavit FBI Special Agent Ryan Dwyer swore out on Nov. 26" and finally, some overall sanity: "A logical defense argument might be that by providing Mohamud resources and opportunity he otherwise lacked, the FBI entrapped him." At Mohamud's arraignment, his attorney told the court, "In cases involving potential entrapment, it's the first meeting that matters." According to Special Agent Dwyer's affidavit, "due to technical problems, the first meeting was not recorded"--which means it will be Mohamud's word versus the Feds', as to who came on stronger to whom, but since we know that the FBI contacted him through an unsolicited email, the likelihood that this case in fact represents archetypal entrapment seems high, though that's unlikely to bother anybody. The Patriot Act has so decimated our standards of Due Process, it's incredible really that Mohamud's been granted a public trial at all.
Giant, unexamined assumptions are driving the War on Terror, which ingeniously combats a lack of enemies to fight by creating enemies through the cruel hypocrisies of policies that promise mutually assured destruction for Muslims and Freedom Lovers and that vast expanse where those two entities overlap. Who knows, perhaps Mohamed Osman Mohamud's trial won't be a pig circus. Maybe some kind of Constitutional miracle awaits the man the general populace will refer to as that Somali guy. But there's no end in sight to the Orwellian War on Terror, of which this Corvallis-based FBI sting is but a grain of sand in amidst a mighty desert of unfounded militarism. This case cannot be separated from the greater War on Terror, it is the War on Terror incarnate, the embryonic impetus to the transformation of the United States into a full-fledged Security State . I oppose the FBI program that corralled Mr. Mohamud away from college, as I oppose the War on Terror. If the phrase war on terror had any meaning whatsoever, it would mean the emergence of some international coalition able to stand up to the United States military, the single greatest, most successful, least impinged terrorist network the world has ever known.
The case of Mr. Mohamud is one of misplaced fear, as there are literally an infinite number of potential avengers for the crimes America has wrought on the world, martyrs unborn as yet, who will grow up in a world where the hegemony of the American Empire's military might went unquestioned by the very people it was claiming to protect, as they made the world, and in turn, America along with it, an immeasurably less safe place. We should only fear the threatening potentialities of the existentially downtrodden masses, dehumanized for their non-American births, for their Muslim faith, for their dark skin, for their resistance to the hegemonic monster bulldozing their home--we should only fear these potential avengers in so far as we can control the creation of new ones. The unquestioned emergence of a Secret Police State, endless war, civil liberties permanently disabled--this is what we should be fearful of, what we should have been fearful of.
What can be done? Shy away from fear of thinking about these things, of talking about them? Today, the same people who call your 9/11 conspiracy theories crackpot craziness, also warn you that you shouldn't disseminate your thoughts on the internet so freewheelingly, inferring unsubtly how grateful they are not to share your subversive daydreams, acknowledging that thinking that way simply is not safe, yet not able to acknowledge that there's anything inherently wrong with that.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
