PoliticalWarfare.org

US should investigate Congressman McGovern's FARC ties

Has the FARC used a US Congressman as a channel to influence Washington's policy toward Colombia? If so, how? Was the congressman an innocent in all this, or was there something more nefarious? These are important questions that the House Ethics Committee and Justice Department should investigate.

At issue is Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), the main figure in Congress behind trying to cut off vital support for Colombia's military, and stopping a free trade arrangement that would help the country's economy. The Wall Street Journal has alleged that McGovern is a FARC sympathizer. McGovern has a long record of sympathy for the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and other leftist revolutionaries.

Colombian Senator Piedad Cordoba, pictured with McGovern and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, is already under criminal investigation in her country for collaborating with the FARC.

Information contained in the laptop computer of the FARC's then-#2 commander, Raul Reyes, suggests McGovern may have gone over the line in building a liaison with the terrorist organization, and that the FARC may have had a plan to advance its interests through other members of McGovern's political party. The Colombian military killed Reyes and captured his computer on March 1. The Colombian Supreme Court says data from that computer, including 900 emails, are grounds for investigating Cordoba. McGovern says his actions were simply part of an innocent effort to help free FARC hostages.

Cordoba appears in the Reyes computer documents as advising FARC not to release hostage Ingrid Betancourt, the senator and former Colombian presidential candidate who was rescued last week. Cordoba wanted to use the hostage releases not as ends in themselves, but as means of improving the image of Hugo Chavez, according to the documents. In an October 27, 2007 email to Reyes, Cordoba called Chavez "my commander." (Click here for the original report, in Spanish, appearing in Colombia's Semana magazine.)

The FARC leader with the nom de guerre Cesar who led the unit holding Betancourt told Reyes in a December 11, 2007 email that Cordoba had urged the FARC to keep Betancourt as a hostage. The Colombian military captured Cesar when it rescued Betancourt and the others last week.

Cordoba, a leftist well known for her FARC ties, was briefly an official Colombian interlocutor last year to negotiate a FARC hostage release under an arrangement with Chavez. US immigration officers held Cordoba for more than two hours at New York's JFK airport last month, despite the fact that she had a diplomatic passport. (She is shown in the photo conversing with FARC Commander Reyes.)

McGovern is a top congressional opponent of the US-Colombia free trade agreement, and helped persuade Speaker Pelosi to sink the pact last April. McGovern has also tried to cut the US military aid to Colombia that has been decisive in taking down the FARC. These points are important, because nearly everything McGovern has done concerning Colombia has undermined that country's progress against, and arguably aided, the narcoterrorist group. The question is, has McGovern been malicious in intent, or just misguided? More importantly, did a foreign terrorist group use a US congressman as an agent or asset to influence and change US foreign and defense policy?

Anyone who has watched Jim McGovern as I have over the past 20-plus years, back to when he was a congressional staffer helping the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and the Cuban-backed guerrillas in El Salvador, knows that he has a soft spot, to put it politely, for the Latino extreme Left. The proposal of a McGovern-FARC go-between - an international negotiations setup involving US Members of Congress and pitting them against the Colombian and US governments - is a carbon copy of the same tactics McGovern promoted to save the Sandinistas and El Salvador's FMLN guerrillas from total defeat in the 1980s. That proposal appeared in the captured Reyes computer.

Nothing in the record suggests that McGovern ever publicly criticized the FMLN for killing American military personnel, or tried to use his influence to get the FMLN to stop killing American servicemen back when he had influence with the guerrilla group. McGovern denies he is a FARC sympathizer. He has gone on record of late criticizing the FARC for its brutality - but then, so have Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez.

The Wall Street Journal commented on McGovern's FARC flirtation last March, when the contents of Reyes' computer became public. Journal editors ascribe McGovern's opposition to a free trade deal with Colombia to his sympathies toward the other side: "We think the documents reveal something else entirely: Some Democrats oppose the Colombia trade deal because they sympathize more with FARC's terrorists than with a US antiterror ally."

Is Congressman McGovern a witting collaborator or an unwitting dupe? What does he have to say about Senator Cordoba? He should come clean right away - and he should justify how his attempts to cut off the Colombian military would have succeeded in taking down the hemisphere's most notorious terrorist group. The House Ethics Committee should launch a probe immediately. So should the Justice Department. Wittingly or unwittingly, Members of Congress should not be agents of influence for foreign terrorists and regimes.

(Click here for Senator Cordoba's webpage containing Congressman McGovern's letter criticizing the Colombian government for breaking off the "Chavez initiative" to negotiate with the FARC. Another page on Cordoba's website contains a quote by McGovern: "I am very disappointed by the termination of the Chavez facilitation initiative." http://www.piedadcordoba.net/indexprincipal.html. A link to the full text is dead.)

Anti-American operatives at VOA's Iranian service

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A music video mocking democracy and heaping scorn on the United States is the product of staffers for the Voice of America's Farsi language service to Iran. The VOA employees used several terrorist propaganda video clips showing IED attacks on American humvees and armored vehicles in Iraq.

The title of the video is "DemoKracy." (Click here to view the video if the YouTube image is not visible above.)

Produced by an obscure Swedish-Iranian band called Abjeez, the music video is themed in and around a TV newsroom, with the anchor and a reporter, played respectively by Safoura and Melody Safavi, mocking the United States and democracy.

The "reporter," shown at right holding the microphone in the first part of the video, is the VOA employee, Melody Safavi, whose married name is Arbabi. This blogger has learned that VOA fired her after an Iranian former political prisoner filed a complaint to Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy Karen Hughes, but her husband Saman Arbabi, who directed the video, reportedly is still on VOA staff.

The video includes pictures of civilian casualties, grieving women and wounded children, Iraqi and American coffins and funerals, and a weather map of the Middle East showing bombs dropping on every country in the greater Middle East, from Sudan and Egypt to Pakistan and Afghanistan. Three nuclear bomb-style mushroom clouds are superimposed over the part of the map depicting Iran. The video closes with an archival aerial photo of a nuclear weapon test in the desert.

Abjeez has produced the video in several languages, though viewer statistics on YouTube show few people worldwide have accessed the video. Nevertheless, the production raises questions about the editorial judgment of VOA personnel, and whether US taxpayers should have such individuals on the payroll to wage the war of ideas against Islamist extremism.

The Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), which governs VOA, has long denied problems with its controversial Iran services. Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) has been raising concerns for a year about the broadcasts to the Islamic republic, but the BBG and State Department were dismissive. Last spring, this blogger also submitted a set of written questions to outgoing Under Secretary of State Hughes at the request of a senior aide, and received a written response that ignored or evaded the answers. It's time for BBG and State to catch up with the new leadership at RFE/RL and tackle the larger problems of US broadcasting into Iran. 

New twist: Lawyers for terrorists sue Blackwater

When Blackwater CEO Erik Prince said that the Center for Constitutional Rights lawsuit against his company is "politically motivated," he was right.

The Center for Constitutional Rights heralds itself as a civil or human rights group, but over the past four decades it has established a firm track record of providing legal assistance, propaganda support, and direct action for terrorists and political extremists who murdered FBI agents and police officers. Its leader is a William Kunstler protege named Michael Ratner (pictured).

Another lawyer in the suit is representing an organization that the US Treasury Department has designated as a fundraising operation for al Qaeda.

I wrote about the terrorist lawyer connection in the October 17 New York Post. The op-ed, titled "Lawyers for Terror," is available here.

The suit is said to be on behalf of ordinary Iraqis whom Blackwater security guards allegedly wounded or killed in the September 16 shootout in Baghdad. The question is, of the million-plus lawyers in the United States, how and why did ordinary Iraqis align themselves with American lawyers who support terrorists? 

Hugo's tasteless tuna

Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez is sending cans of tuna to Peruvian earthquake victims - with a picture of himself on the label.

Joining Chavez on the tuna can is Lt. Col. Ollanta Humala, his favored candidate to become president of Peru.

"Thousands of cans of tuna with photos of the Venezuelan president and his Peruvian subordinate Humala are being distributed in the disaster zones," the Lima newspaper Expreso reports.

The cans were shipped to the stricken areas of Pisco, Ica, Chincha and Cañete. Relief workers gave Expreso access to the Venezuelan aid. The tuna labels also feature a red "O" that was the symbol of Ollanta's political campaign, and contain political slogans linking Ollanta with the "Bolivarian Republic" of Venezuela.

The labels were printed specifically to take advantage of the earthquake, as the heavy-handed language shows. Here's a direct translation of one of the sentences on cans distributed in Ica, where a quarter of the city's buildings were destroyed: "In front of the national disaster that happened to Peru, and overall to our Ica region, the Peruvian Nationalist Party, with our leader Ollanta makes itself present, together with our sister Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, whose president is our brother Hugo Chavez, is due to the fact that the current Peruvian government acts in an inefficient manner, slow and heartless, and heedless of the pain of the victims and leaving them at the mercy of hunger, thirst and criminal gangs." 

US Naval Institute Proceedings gives thumbs-up to war of ideas book

Proceedings, the magazine of the United States Naval Institute, runs a favorable review of my book, Fighting the War of Ideas like a Real War.

In the August 2007 issue, Lt. Dan Reiher, USN, says that the book "clearly demonstrates that the new thrust in the war of ideas does not have to originate in US government releases."

The Navy reviewer concludes, "By focusing primarily on the offensive aspects of strategic communication, the author has made a worthwhile contribution to what must be a key component of U.S. strategy in the terrorism war. For those who find themselves in a position to affect U.S. communication efforts, or to influence our image among allies and adversaries, this book should be placed at the top of their must-read list."

Proceedings does not publish the book reviews in its current online editions, but the attached document contains a copy of the review: Download proceedings_review_aug_07.pdf

Wahhabi propaganda? Not!

People who advocate waging semantic warfare to widen rifts among the radical Islamists and split them from their support bases are obviously doing the work of . . . the Wahhabis and the Muslim Brotherhood. This blogger apparently is one of them.

That's untrue, of course, but it's the logic of a few otherwise well-informed critics out there. Meanwhile, one of the leading Americans who has promoted the concept of using Islamic terminology to split the bad guys is being accused - falsely - of taking money from the horrid Saudi Arabian regime. The rest of us, according to the false accusers, are dupes. In their view, it's much smarter for the US to unite our Islamist enemies against us - along with most of the Muslim world - than it is to split them apart from one another.

Here's the situation. Prof. Doug Streusand of the Marine Corps University, Col. Harry Tunnell of the National Defense University and I are allegedly doing the dirty work of the Wahhabis and the Muslim Brotherhood. We are unwittingly helping them, according to one person, because we argue that the US should split the "jihadist" movement by taking the narrative away from al Qaeda, Palestinian extremists, and Ahmadinejad, and empowering disadvantaged Muslims who lack the inclination or will to make war on us.

We developed our ideas, according to a recent column by Walid Phares, by following the "concocted" words of a "lobbyist" whose paymaster Phares won't mention but whom the reader infers must be a really bad guy. Hugh Fitzgerald of JihadWatch.com, however, says it outright: the alleged Wahhabi paid propagandist is our colleague Jim Guirard.

Now, I like Walid Phares and respect his work, and the guys at JihadWatch.com are doing a tremendous service even though I don't always agree with them. Here's the problem: In this particular instance, they have their facts wrong.

First, we didn't develop these ideas on our own, but got them from Muslim scholars and Arabic linguists whom I cite in my writings. No Muslim should be expected to take a non-Muslim seriously on a theological question, which is why some of us urge merely that the US in its messaging amplify what the disadvantaged Muslims - who lack state backing from Riyadh or Tehran, or the networks of the Muslim Brotherhood - are saying.

Wahhabis have been trying to lay a claim on jihad that American policymakers generally have endorsed. Interpretations by non-extreme Muslims generally have gone unheeded. Having been one of the first to write about the "Wahhabi lobby" in Washington, I never found a case of Wahhabi-backed groups in this country questioning the absolutist, Saudi-sponsored propaganda theme, with one sole exception that was in direct response to an inquiry about a definition, and was a thematical part of a message. (If our critics would like to provide documentation to the contrary, I would like to see it and will gladly post it.)

In 2001 and 2002 I researched the Saudi-funded Grover Norquist network for my friend Frank Gaffney at the Center for Security Policy, where I am a vice president, and published copies of the very checks that Muslim Brotherhood operative and convicted terrorist conspirator Abdurahman Alamoudi wrote to fund Norquist's Islamic Institute. Having written exposes of Islamist agitprop in this country and given Senate testimony about terrorist recruitment in prisons, I take it seriously when a good man like Phares says what he says.

But in this instance his facts are wrong. Phares' most damning allegation is that Guirard is a lobbyist who, we are led to believe, created his semantic warfare concept for his shadowy client. Though he uses the term "lobby" three times to try to discredit Guirard, Phares never says for whom Guirard lobbied, or when. If he had checked, he would have found that Guirard hasn't lobbied for about seven years, and he never lobbied for any Middle East interests.

Phares apparently got the "lobbying" misinformation from Hugh FitzGerald of Jihad Watch but didn't bother to check the facts himself. On July 9, Fitzgerald flatly - and wrongly - said that Guirard is "closely connected to the Saudis," and that "some say the Saudi Embassy and the Saudi lobby, all-powerful as ever, channel their views right through him...." Fitzgerald didn't say who "some" was, but we take it as editorializing in lieu of using the first-person.

There's no truth to the story. Guirard has no connection at all to the Saudis. That leaves us to wonder, Are these allegations a deliberate smear of Guirard over a policy diffence, or are they just sloppy and irresponsible reporting? I hope it's only the latter. In which case the accusers should retract and apologize.

Now, to tip the hat to Robert Spencer, any believing Christian or Muslim knows that the mankind cannot coexist in perpetuity on earth without his respective religion being supreme. Both faiths actively seek converts and teach doctrines based on their belief in divine revelation that their own religion will dominate the world. It doesn't take a "hater" to understand this theological fact. Much interfaith dialogue has addressed the issue. The fact that Muslims are more aggressive in spreading and enforcing their faith than are Christians is reason to give any true Christian pause.

But for government policy purposes, we are not taking a supernatural view of the current war of ideas. We are looking at this war as a conflict of men. In our secular, post-Christian society that recoils in horror at the thought of our government waging ideological warfare against Islamism, we would rather pretend that the fight is all about politics and culture. Only the Islamists and their followers, and a smattering of Christians, believe that the issue is spiritual warfare. For the rest of the world, including the United States, it's all a question of superior firepower, politics and self-flagellation.

And that's too bad. The Spencers and Phareses of the world certainly do have a point: for the most part, the most militant believers in converting the world's faithful are Muslims. The other believers are patsies in comparison. Even so-called "good" jihad has world spiritual conquest as an ultimate if vague goal. So in this sense, Spencer and Phares are right. That's a long-term strategic issue, and a religious one. Speaking for myself, my policy recommendations - to break the Wahhabi/Muslim Brotherhood/al Qaeda narratives - are strictly tactical and temporal, as I spell out in Fighting the War of Ideas like a Real War.

From a Christian standpoint, it's understandable why our critics like Spencer and Phares take the absolutist positions that they do. But let's win the current war first.

What is not understandable - or permissible - is that they or their sources use inaccurate and even phony "facts" as bludgeons against good people like Jim Guirard. 

Sophisticated online movie poster campaign proliferates on Islamist websites

Supporters of the insurgency in Iraq show a native fluency in American popular culture in a chilling new online propaganda campaign aimed at undermining American troops.

In an exclusive July 9 report, Sky News exhibits 14 Hollywood-style movie posters, most based on horror or action movies, satirizing the American military. The posters feature images of American troops and war casualties. The artistic quality of the posters exceeds most of the extremist propaganda aimed at Iraqi or other Muslim audiences.

While the origin of the posters at this time is uncertain, Sky News reports that the images are proliferating on extreme Islamist websites and attributes them to the insurgents. To show the type of propaganda the US is up against, we reproduce some of those posters at left and below. The full selection is available here.

The US has mounted no comparable effort, though this blogger has long advocated the widescale use of satire as a weapon in his new book, Fighting the War of Ideas like a Real War.

Let's see how long it takes before more "mainstream" American and British opponents of the war start using these posters for their own political purposes.

Masterwork: RFE/RL briefing on Iraqi insurgent websites

Here's a real masterpiece of research that deserves a lot of attention: A 70-minute briefing on the insurgent and terrorist websites in Iraq.

It's relevant scholarship at its finest. I received a sneak preview of this presentation last spring, and thought it so important that I arranged a live briefing for senior-level policymakers in Washington prior to the report's completion. Now it's available to the public.

"The greatest strengths of the Iraqi Sunni-based insurgency's media strategy - decentralization and flexibility - are also its greatest weaknesses," according to a report released June 26 by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

"The book-length report, Iraqi Insurgent Media: The War Of Images And Ideas by RFE/RL regional analysts Daniel Kimmage and Kathleen Ridolfo, provides an in-depth analysis of the media efforts of Sunni insurgents, who are responsible for the majority of U.S. combat deaths in Iraq," according to a release.

The 26,000-word report and a 70-minute audio briefing are available by clicking here. It's true to the highest standards of the old RFE/RL Research Institute and is one of the most relevant pieces of work to help win the war. I can't recommend this report highly enough.

Washington Post publishes paid Chinese propaganda

Now delivered to your driveway in time for breakfast: Paid Chinese propaganda. The Washington Post is the delivery system for “Reports from China,” a six-page Chinese Communist Party propaganda tract posing as an “advertising supplement."

The sheet, appearing under the rubric of China Daily, is designed to resemble a real newspaper. It appears to be modeled after the Washington Post’s ongoing Russian propaganda supplement paid for by the Kremlin’s semi-official Rossiyskaya Gazeta paper and Novosti “news” agency.

The first issue of “Reports from China” appeared as section H1 of the May 15 Washington Post. Don’t look for truth-in-labeling there. The Post does not carry a disclaimer to tell the reader that supplements are wholly-owned subsidiaries of the respective regimess in Beijing and Moscow.

Propaganda state

It's all smiles, moderation and good news in sunny Russia, now that the Putin regime is forcing radio stations to make sure that at least 50 percent of the news about the country is positive.

Russian News Service employees tell the New York Times that under the new guidelines, "opposition leaders could not be mentioned on the air and the United States was to be portrayed as an enemy." Only "moderate" political views may be aired.

"Now, the implementation of the '50 percent positive' rule at the Russian News Service leaves an increasingly small number of news outlets that are not managed by the Kremlin, directly or through the state national gas company, Gazprom, a major owner of media assets," the New York Times reports.

The regime is also cracking down on the Internet.

Rather than apply official censorship as the Soviets did, the Putin regime is simply taking direct or indirect control or ownership of media organizations, firing the editors, and installing yes-men who offer bland fare.

This is an opportunity for the United States. Russia's free media days - when people were so saturated with independent and interesting content that few had a desire to turn to US-backed surrogate radios - are over. US-backed Radio Liberty and other stations are vital now. It's time to return them to their origins as surrogates for a free media inside Russia - on the radio waves and online.