The Best Counter-Terrorism in the US is Social Justice

Much has been made of the arrests in Miami of seven would-be terrorists. Gonzales is grandstanding his success and some pundits are calling this a pre-election stunt.
South Florida Sun-Sentinel

When a grand jury indicted seven men who pledged allegiance to al-Qaida, federal officials claimed a victory against homegrown terrorism. "They were persons who for whatever reason came to view their home country as the enemy," Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said Friday.
Relying on a confidential informant, authorities snared the loosely organized group of wayward men -- five U.S. citizens, one legal resident from Haiti and one Haitian illegal immigrant. The Justice Department made it clear that it is determined to stop people from following the model of al-Qaida, the international terrorist organization responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C.

However, very little information has supported the idea that these obviously disturbed poverty stricken young men had any capability of doing what they talked about.
Duluth News Tribune

Even as Justice Department officials trumpeted the arrests of seven Florida men accused of planning to wage a "full ground war against the United States," they acknowledged the group did not have the means to carry out the plan. The Justice Department unveiled the arrests with an orchestrated series of news conferences in two cities, but the severity of the charges compared with the seemingly amateurish nature of the group raised concerns among civil libertarians. "We're as puzzled as everyone else," said Howard Simon, the director of the Florida chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. "There's no weapons, no explosives, but this major announcement."

In fact the ring leader appears to be mentally ill.
New York Daily News

The father of the accused ringleader of a wacky terrorist cell said yesterday he can't understand how a son who went to church every Sunday and attended Catholic schools could end up charged with plotting to wreak havoc on America's tallest building. "My son wasn't raised this way. He needs psychiatric help," Narcisse Batiste, 72, told the Daily News yesterday from his home in Bunkie, La. "I disagree with wrongdoing, and I don't believe in trashing the country where you live. If he made statements like that, he definitely needs some psychiatric treatment."


Prosecutors say Narseal Batiste, 32, led a bizarre group of ragtag renegades in Florida who wanted to launch a holy war by bombing the Miami FBI office and Chicago's Sears Tower - the tallest building in North America and a fixture of the skyline in the city where Narseal Batiste was raised.


Narcisse Batiste said his son was arrested in 1993 for breaking a car window. Something happened the next year, the dad said. A charismatic man - who wore a black robe and carried a walking stick, and whose identity he did not know - converted his son to a sect that mixed Islam, Christianity, Judaism and martial arts.

I haven't quoted Juan Cole in a while since he usually talks about Iraq. I'm pretty sick of writing about that hell hole. But I tripped over some comments he made about the Miami terrorist cell that seems to put them in proper perspective.
Informed Comment

The other thing to say is that American law is soft on cultic practices, of dirty tricks against and smearing of critics, enforced third-party shunning, manipulation, and group coercion. These things are not protected by the First Amendment and I think one part of our counter-terrorism strategy must be to develop legal strategies to make it easier to disrupt the workings of cults before they accumulate a critical mass for violent action. The practice of just letting the head of the Internal Revenue Service decide if a group is a tax-free religion should also be revisited. In the past, some IRS heads appear to have been blackmailed by cults into granting them that status, which allows them to accumulate more wealth.


Whereas most terrorism is a form of educated, middle class politics, this particular group clearly grew out of the grievances and resentments of race and class inequality in the United States.


The sister of one was just on MSNBC saying that he deeply resented Bush spending money to drop bombs on poor people who could not defend themselves, while depriving the poor in the United States of any support. "We are not capable," she said. This is a theory of class war, connecting the poor of Kut with the poor of Miami's inner city. The city, by the way, has horrific levels of unemployment.


The position of the poor and workers in particular is deteriorating in the US, as more and more of the privately held wealth is concentrated in the hands of a white, privileged, few. The unions have been gutted, the minimum wage is inadequate, and racist attitudes are reemerging on a worrisome scale. Cities such as Detroit, New Orleans and Miami continue to witness enormous strains coming mainly from racist attitudes. In this case, the best counter-terrorism would be more social justice.

The rich are getting richer, the poor poorer. We are creating the kind of conditions in America where terrorism appears to be a way to express frustration, take on a mission albeit self-destructive, and do some damage on the way out. The kind of dispareties that create seething anger is what is the seed of terrorism, in the world and stateside. We are in a war about the hearts and minds and pocket books of the world's poorest. While we can't hope to solve the problem of dispareties any time soon, we certainly are making things worse by creating greater distance between the rich and poor.