The Running Dogs Of Terrorology

By Nabeel Abraham
Lies Of Our Times
May 1993, pp. 6 – 8

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On March 1, 1993, three days after the February 26 bombing of the World Trade Center, Peter Jennings opened the ABC-TV nightly newscast provocatively: "There is much speculation, and many agendas, vying to account for what happened in lower Manhattan on Friday."

By then the brush fire of speculation had spread throughout the mass media, fanned largely by terrorism experts bearing self-serving agendas.

Round Up the Usual Suspects

Within 24 hours of the Trade Center blast, the New York Times and other major media began rounding up the usual suspects – Hezbollah, Hamas, Iran, Libya, Iraq. In a bow to current developments, the media added Serbs, Croats, and Bosnians to the line-up, along with the IRA, Sendero Luminoso, and the Colombian drug cartels.

Big questions remain:
Who really was behind the bombing and what was its purpose?

On February 28, Times reporter Douglas Jehl produced a list of "terrorist groups" along with "the principal car bombings and related attacks for which they have been blamed" (p. A35). Meanwhile, on page 1, Robert McFadden reported that New York's police commissioner and the local FBI chief "were emphatic in saying it was too early to tell who or what was behind the explosion." McFadden previously noted that "preliminary tests from the debris found no evidence of plastic explosives often used by terrorists it appeared that a terrorist's car bomb was only one possible explanation." The possibility existed that "a disgruntled or deranged worker might have set off the blast," he added.

In his review of terrorist suspects, Jehl quickly ruled out Serbian and Croatian nationalists because "neither group is known to engage in car bombing" (ibid., national edition). By this logic, the Palestinian group Hamas should have been excluded because it too has not engaged in car bombings. Not included in any roundup of the usual suspects were Basque and Tamil separatists, frequent users of car bombs in the past (see Time and Newsweek magazines, March 8).

A Mossad Connection?

Also excluded from the media's list of notorious car bombers was one of the most efficient and deadliest car bombers around – Israel's Mossad. Mossad is suspected in a number of car bombings of PLO targets in Lebanon and in various European capitals.

Curiously, the media in the U.S. have kept a tight lid on an intriguing bit of information possibly linking an Israeli woman, and perhaps, by extension Mossad, to Mohammed Salameh. According to the complaint read at his court appearance, Salameh gave the name and telephone number of Guzie Hadass as a reference when he rented the van. A letter addressed to him was found at the address of the phone number, as well as "tools and wiring, and manuals concerning antennae, circuitry and electromagnetic devices" (Jane Hunter, citing the complaint, Middle East International, March 19, p. 6). Hunter came across this startling quote from FBI spokesman Joe Valiquette in the March 8 International Herald Tribune: "We have no idea whether Hadass is a member of the Israeli Mossad, but even if it were true, we wouldn't tell you anyway."

This, of course, proves nothing. But imagine the hysteria had Salameh given the name and phone number of an Iranian woman. The story gets murkier, however. Salameh's circle of Muslims overlapped with Sayyid Nosair's, the man who was charged in the murder of Rabbi Meir Kahane. According to the February issue of the newsletter, Inside Israel, Kahane's son claims that "both the FBI and Mossad had infiltrated the group to which Nosair belonged." "Benyamin Kahane says he was told by an FBI informant he identifies as Mustafa Shalabi that Nosair's brother worked for the FBI" (Hunter, Middle East International). Shalabi was a former colleague of Sheik Omar Abdul Rahman, who later turned up dead. While the major media have repeatedly sought to link Salameh and Nosair, they have carefully avoided looking into any possible FBI or Mossad links to the suspects. Compare the foregoing to how the Times handled in-depth stories about Salameh, Nosair, and the Kahane murder (e.g., Ralph Blumenthal, New York Times, March 10, p. A12; Alison Mitchell, New York Times, March 14, p. A1).

Emerson's Snake Oil

The media's roster of suspects was extremely tendentious. Hezbollah and the IRA appeared in virtually every grouping of suspects. And, indeed, both have detonated car bombs; the IRA, in fact, may well have invented the grisly technique. Yet the Times's Jehl and the Wall Street Journal's Carley each eliminated the IRA as a prime suspect on the grounds that the U.S. is an important political and financial base for the Irish groups. Had reporters and their terrorism experts been consistent, Hezbollah also should have been eliminated as a prime suspect on the same grounds, for Hezbollah, like the IRA, has many sympathizers in the United States.

Pro-Israeli agit-propagandist Steven Emerson, writing in the aftermath of the New York bombing, claimed that Hezbollah and other Islamic groups have developed "extensive infrastructures" in the U.S., where they "recruit, provide command-and-control, raise funds and direct terrorist attacks in their own countries from bases as seemingly mundane as supermarkets in Chicago or bakeries in Brooklyn" ("The Snake of Terror in Our Garden," Wall Street Journal, March 5, p. A8).

So, whereas the IRA's extensive U.S. support network was reason enough to exclude it as a suspect in the bombing, Hezbollah's alleged network, localized in supermarkets and bakeries, was sufficient to implicate it and other Islamic groups in the same bombing. Emerson's snake oil is as venomous as Bruce Hoffman's claim (cited by Jehl) that Hezbollah is "the Swiss watchmaker of car bombings" (p. 35, national edition).

Three Scenarios to Choose From

Once it was determined that a bomb had caused the New York explosion, one could choose from three possible scenarios. Scenario One called for a disgruntled (or deranged) employee planting the bomb as revenge. Police investigators repeatedly raised this possibility, although they neglected the equally plausible scenario that a desperate or deranged businessperson might have blown up the Trade Towers for insurance money. If investigators did mention the latter possibility, the national media and the terrorologists they consulted didn't pick up on it.

But they didn't pick up on the disgruntled worker thesis either, largely because they were embracing the idea that foreign terrorists were behind the bombing long before they could point to any evidence to support their suspicion.

In contrast, the police investigators were on firm ground. Workplace homicide is the "fastest-growing form of murder in America" (Thomas F. O'Boyle, "Disgruntled Workers Intent on Revenge Increasingly Harm Colleagues and Bosses," Wall Street Journal, September 15, 1992, p. B1). "Of some 7,000 fatal injuries that occurred in the work place each year" between 1980 and 1988, "12 percent were homicides," according to a recent study by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health cited by O'Boyle.

Scenario Two, also largely ignored by the media and its terrorologists, held that the bombing might have been the work of a local group of zealots (Muslims, Serbs, Croats, Arabs, Iranians, or even plain Americans) – operating on their own – seeking to avenge some perceived wrong committed by Washington (or New York) (see "Terror City," The Nation, March 29, p. 399). The Wall Street Journal made a feeble attempt to concede that a new breed of terrorists, operating "largely on their own," might have emerged, but in the end the paper refused to let go of its international terrorist network thesis (William Carley and Timothy O'Brien, March 17, p. A1).

If, indeed, local Muslims were behind the bombing, they may have been trying to "help" fellow Muslims in Bosnia by provoking U.S. military "retaliation" against Serbia. This might explain why the first caller claiming responsibility for the bombing said he was speaking for the "Serbian Liberation Front," a hitherto unknown group (Newsweek, March 8, p. 24).

Other Zealots

Farfetched? Maybe. But one should never forget that nationalist and religious zealots are quite capable of working great mischief, unaided and undirected, in the name of a "higher cause." A good example is the Jewish Defense League and its splinters, which launched a series of bombings in the 1980s that resulted in several deaths, including the gruesome murder of Arab-American activist Alex Odeh. The FBI designated the bombing that killed Odeh this country's deadliest terrorist act for 1985. Although the murderers, according to the FBI, fled to a Jewish settlement on the Israeli-occupied West Bank, it is doubtful that Odeh's murder was masterminded by Mossad. This was a case of self-appointed "defenders of Zion" acting on their own.

Scenario Three said that the bombing was the work of foreign terrorists, either operating on their own or at the behest of a "terrorist state." This scenario faces the major hurdle of plausible motive. Why would any Third World government allow a "terrorist" organization to use its soil to plan an attack on the one country that has demonstrated time and time again its readiness to pulverize half of the world? Moreover, contrary to media portrayals, political/military organizations – whether Serbian, Croatian, Arab, Muslim, etc. – are generally far too politically astute to see any benefit from such a senseless terrorist act. Yet, curiously enough, Scenario Three was favored by the mass media and its terrorologists virtually to the exclusion of the other two.

Those Inscrutable Terrorists

The experts consulted by the major media enjoyed wide latitude owing to the scarcity of information about what caused the blast. It took two days, for example, for investigators to conclude with some certainty that a bomb had caused the explosion. Even the kind of explosives remained a mystery a week after the bombing. Moreover, the explosion lacked all the telltale markings of "terrorist" bombings. There was no call before the blast, no message, no apparent motive, no evidence of plastic explosives.

Seasoned terrorologists like Mike Ackerman, Brian Jenkins, Robert Kupperman, Bruce Hoffman, Noel Koch, Neil Livingstone – the very people with a vested interest in promoting the international terrorist connection – wasted little time in shoehorning contradictory bits of evidence into Scenario Three, often producing ludicrous results in the process.

For example, prior to the arrest of Mohammed Salameh, thanks apparently to the suspect's bungling ineptitude, the terrorologists proclaimed the New York bombing to be "a world-class hit" (Ackerman, as quoted by William Carley, Wall Street Journal, March 1, p. A1) that demonstrated "a good deal of sophistication" (Livingstone, as quoted by Douglas Jehl, New York Times, March 1, p. B4). The day of Salameh's arrest, Livingstone appeared on Dan Rather's CBS Evening News arguing that the bombing was the work of a sophisticated international terrorist organization (March 4). Terrorology had reached new heights of illogic.

As details of the bombing became known, a Times editorial conceded that the bomb was "relatively primitive" in nature, suggesting an "amateur job" (March 6). The editorial unwittingly further contradicted the terrorologist's claim that the bombing was an elaborate foreign conspiracy by observing that "it's easy, too easy, in the United States to fill up a van with dynamite bought over the counter or stolen from mines or construction sites."

Every square peg of information available was pounded into the round holes of the media/terrorologist's thesis. The bombers' silence, so out of character for politically motivated terrorists, was said by Noel Koch, chief terrorologist of the Reagan administration, to be their way of creating "anxiety and unease" in the nation (Douglas Jehl, "Americans Feel Terror's Senseless Logic," New York Times, March 7, p. E1). The lack of an obvious reason for the bombing was explained away by terrorologist Brian Jenkins claim that terrorists have their own logic, which just happens to defy Western comprehension. Terrorists' motives, you must understand, can be very inscrutable (Robert Kupperman), surpassed, apparently, only by the inscrutability of those who profess to understand them.