Radical Terrorist Group Seeks WASP Suicide Bombers
Reported by Marie Therese - August 17, 2004 -
Big Story with John Gibson. August 16, 2004. 5:44 PM to 5:47 PM EDT
Guest: Michael Swetnam, former CIA officer. Transcript available at Can Al Qaeda Recruit Westerners?
The gist of Mr. Swetnam's premise is that Al Qaeda is seeking "White Anglo-Saxon Protestants" to fill out its ranks.
Some of what he had to say was eerily similar to terminology heard in the McCarthy era.
For example:
SWETNAM: "The nightmare scenario of counterterrorism experts today is that there's an Al Qaeda cell sitting around the block that we have not been able to identify, because they look like us, they act like us, and, in fact, they were probably born here and have been recruited into this horrible organization."
And later:
SWETNAM: "What they're recruiting often aren't the bin Laden-type zealots, but they're people like John Walker Lindh, who are interested in it, driven towards it, but they're not as committed as some of the others...But it's going to take an intelligence effort that we haven't mounted yet..."
Swetnam, thankfully, does end with the caveat that "we don't want to compromise the liberties that define us as who we are."
However, this one sentence taken in the context of an entire interview that clearly sets forth the case that "they" might be living next door to you, "they" might be teaching your children, "they" might attend your church, seems like reading someone their Miranda rights after you've broken their nose!
Which leads one to wonder: Why would FOX News want Americans to accept a new face of Al Qaeda, one that's blue-eyed and blonde? "Tis a puzzlement!
Another thing that I found distressing in this interview was Mr. Swetnam's distortion - oh, OK, lie - about John Walker Lindh.
Early on, he says: "Remember that in late 2001 we captured John Walker Lindh, an American of an Anglo-Saxon Protestant American family, who joined that organization and went to Afghanistan to train alongside other Al Qaeda members." In this statement, Swetnam says that Lindh trained with "other Al Qaeda members", clearly indicating that Lindh was a member of Al Qaeda.
John Lindh was NOT a member of Al Qaeda. He joined the Taliban, who were running the country of Afghanistan a bare month before 9/11. He has never been charged or even accused by the government of being a member of Al Qaeda. As new pictorial evidence shows, he's was tortured in much the same way the prisoners at Abu Graib were. Which may mean that eventually the 20 year sentence will be reduced or the case revisited in the light of what we now know about the abominable treatment prisoners received in Iraq and Afghanistan.
According to an article by Dave Lindorff (A First Glimpse at Bush's Tortureshow):
"In truth, the government's case against Lindh was always spurious at best. A 20-year-old, white, middle-class convert to Islam from Marin County, California, Lindh had only gone to Afghanistan in August 2001, scarcely a month before the 9/11 attacks and the subsequent U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. At the time of his arrival there, the Taliban government, far from being an enemy of America, was still receiving funding from the U.S. government. Lindh, to the extent that he was ever a fighter with the Taliban (he hadn't had time for a decent "boot camp" training in weapons use), was in fact fighting the Northern Alliance, not America, at the time of the U.S. invasion. His attorneys maintain that he never was an enemy of his own country, and in fact had been trapped with the Taliban in Afghanistan by the surprise U.S. invasion.
What appears to have led Ashcroft and the U.S. government to drop its serious charges against Lindh, and to agree to a settlement on minor charges, was his defense attorneys' plans to go after testimony about his treatment from other Afghani captives being held at Guantanamo who had witnessed it.
Had those witnesses been permitted to testify in his case--as the judge had already said he would probably agree to, given Lindh's constitutional right to mount a vigorous defense--there would have been plenty of embarrassing evidence presented about torture and abuse at the hands of U.S. troops. (End of excerpt)
