Goodbye to 2009, Hello to 2010: Year of the Tiger

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

Once again hands are raised in stupefaction. How could they have missed him – meaning in this case Umar Abdulmutallab the Nigerian bomber on that flight from Amsterdam to Detroit. Why, his own father – one of the most powerful bankers in Africa – gave the US embassy in Lagos a warning! He was on the US master computer list of potential terrorists but never made it on to the watch list.

The Truthers reject the obvious answers – caution, bureaucratic inertia, buck-passing, turf fights – and say it was a plot. Obama joins Bush and Cheney in the big conspiracy. It won’t be long before David Griffin rushes out a book on the affair.

Personally, I’m not at all dismayed at evidence that intelligence gathering networks are flawed, that bureaucrats pass the buck. Hyper-efficiency in these matters indicates we have arrived at the perfect police state.

Of course there is room for common sense and elementary vigilance. In the case of the Virginia Tech killer there was plenty of evidence that Cho Seung-hui was a time bomb waiting to explode. Students talked about him as a possible shooter and refused to take classes with him. His essays so disturbed one of his teachers with their violent ravings that she arranged a secret signal in case she needed security during her tutorials.

And then was there was proof positive that the time bomb had exploded and the mass murder session began in the engineering building, the police state proved all too human in actual performance. The police cowered behind their cruisers until Cho Seung-hui finished off the last batch of his 32 victims, then killed himself. Then the police bravely rushed in and started sticking their guns in the faces of the traumatised students, screaming at them to freeze or be shot.

Major Hasan offers another bracing illustration of the human capacity to avoid unpleasant decisions, like dealing with an Army shrink who had Soldier of Islam on his visiting cards, discussed openly the ethics of armed resistance to Christian assaults on Islam and so forth.

But without the advantage of hindsight were the signs that obvious? Not really. A Serbian woman I met at a New Years Party says that on her way from Abu Dhabi to Seattle she passed though Amsterdam airport the same day as Abdulmutallab and security was tight and the questioning she got was pretty rigorous. The story – now canonized by conspiracists – of the well dressed man trying to finagle a passportless Abdulmutallab onto the plane seems to be without foundation.

Now there’s an avalanche of punditry about Britain’s Islamic minority as the petrie dish in which toxic cultures of militant Islam flourish and multiply. At this rate they’ll soon be deploying the Delta Force in Birmingham and bombing mosques across the Midlands with drones.

The real petrie dish is US national policy, abetted by junior partners in the UK, France and Germany: widening attacks on Afghanistan, an unfolding record of torturing captives to death since 2001, full support for Israel’s onslaughts on Palestinians and calculated mass murder. What does a radical imam in the UK or Yemen have to offer as incitement to attack America that is as vividly persuasive as Obama and Hillary Clinton’s cheerleading for Israel or the posture of the US Congress?

A glance back through 2009

January

So many ghosts crowded the inauguration dais that it’s not surprising Chief Justice Roberts flubbed his lines and had to be corrected by the man he was swearing in. Over there on the right! That jowly fellow with the 5 o’clock shadow and the long upsweeping nose. It’s Richard Nixon on January 20, 1973. He’d swept every state in the union in November’s election, except for Massachusetts and the District of Columbia.

Listen to him: "As we meet here today, we stand on the threshold of a new era of peace in the world." Yet American B-52s were still bombing Cambodia, as they had virtually throughout his administration. One-and-a-half years later he resigned, rather than face impeachment.

Why look! Nixon’s smiling. He’s just heard Obama call for “a new era of responsibilityâ€