[disclosure: I do NOT think that the London bombings were carried out by American or British operatives]
This reality-based stuff has me annoyed. So, I am going to write a little bit about spycraft. There are different kinds of missions that an intelligence agency can undertake. If they want to look at your psychiatric files, they do what is called a ‘clandestine operation’. They break into your shrink’s office, make copies of the files, and put them back. No one is the wiser.
But other operations cannot be concealed. The assassination of Fidel Castro, for example, would be noticed. When crafting a plan to assassinate a foreign leader there are two main objectives. The first is that the target is killed. The second is that someone else gets blamed for carrying out the assassination. Missions such as these are called ‘covert operations’.
You can read about the CIA’s history of plotting assassinations in the Church Commission.
Now, does the CIA have any history of using bombs on innocent civilians? Let’s ask Bob Woodward.
Let’s review what that bomb did in human terms:
The bomb went off outside a block of flats and close to a mosque as worshippers were gathering for Friday night prayers in a densely populated Shia Muslim suburb.
It is the worst attack in the Lebanese capital since November 1983 when 61 people were killed in a suicide car bomb attack in the southern port of Tyre.
The bomb blew a huge crater in the street and destroyed two seven-storey blocks of flats, a mosque and a cinema. Many of the dead were passers-by.
The blast brought gunmen running on to the streets firing guns into the air to clear the roads for ambulances.
Radio stations broadcast appeals for blood donors as fire fighters and civil defence workers tried to remove bodies from under the rubble.
Fleets of ambulances jammed the entrance to west Beirut’s main hospital. It was soon packed with wounded and dead.
The bomb went off near the home of a leading fundamentalist Shia Muslim cleric, Sheikh Muhammad Husain Fadlallah and it is thought he may have been the target – although he was not hurt in the attack.
Sheikh Fadlallah later accused Israel and its “internal allies” of being behind the explosion and he gave a warning to “all those who are playing with fire” that their hands will be “burned by the flames”.
BBC
You will hear people deny that the CIA carried out this attack to this day. That is to be expected. It was a covert operation.
After the Church Commission exposed the CIA’s plots to kill foreign leaders, we made it illegal to assassinate foreign leaders. It was never considered legal to set off car bombs in front of mosques, and we have presumably stopped using such tactics. The important thing to remember is that no operation along these lines would be carried out without plausible deniability.
Ideally, someone else would be blamed, false leads would have been placed in advance. Hotel bills, credit card transactions, traces of explosives in someone’s apartment. That is how a covert activity is designed. And an illegal covert operation will take extreme care in this regard.
The result is obvious. Anyone who had the audacity to blame the CIA for the Beirut bombing would be shown evidence that the Syrians or the Iranians were behind it. And then they would be called a tin-foil hat wearing lunatic, with no credibility.
I have never seen any evidence that the CIA has ever carried out a terrorist attack against American or British citizens. I know the Brits tolerated attacks on their citizens that could have been averted, in order to maintain a high level mole in the IRA. I know that a plan was discussed to carry out attacks on Floridians, blame it on Castro, and use it as a pretext to invade Cuba. But that plan was never implemented, obviously.
Anyone who is familiar with the history of espionage will NOT describe speculation on whether the Anglo intelligence services were behind the bombing as a ‘bullshit theory’ or ‘non-reality based’.
This is especially true because the Anglo services had all the appropriate motives to carry out the bombing. Support for the war is cratering, and if it continues to crater politicians will start getting nervous about their careers and asking us to pull out. The strategic thinking that went into starting this war did not envision that we would pull out and have Iran take over strategic dominance of Iraq.
Whoever set off the bombs just gave new oxygen to the war effort. If the goal is to win the war, this act would be a smart one.
Now, having said all this, I still think the most likely explanation is the one being bandied about. The bombings were probably carried out by a small cell of Muslim terrorists. Their motive was to punish Tony Blair for being a part of the coalition in Iraq. They may have hoped the Brits would leave the coalition, further weakening our position in Iraq, and hastening our departure.
If so, they did NOT make a smart move.
What I have just written is reality. We don’t know what happened. We would like to believe that the people in the Bush/Blair administrations are moral people that would not kill their own citizens. I believe they would refuse to sign off on any proposal of this type.
But, if history teaches us anything, it should teach us NOT to blindly accept the explanations of our governments. The Tonkin incident was bunk, the Kuwaiti orphan baby story was bunk, the WMD story was bunk.
Finally, in conclusion, I want to say that most people are not this cynical. They don’t know about a lot of things that have been done in the past, and they don’t want to believe them. They don’t want to believe that the CIA would set off a car bomb during Friday prayers in Beirut, and kill scores of people. If you suggest something of this kind might have happened, then people will make fun of you. They’ll call you a nut. And if a community is seen engaging in this kind of speculation, they will be marginalized, ridiculed, and important people will stop paying attention to what you have to say.
It’s an unfortunate reality that speculation of this type is bad for an online community that has a goal of helping to shape policy. But it would be a perfectly sane, reasonable topic for discussion on a board that has no other purpose but free speech.
So, enough with telling people that they are unreasonable, or not living in a reality-based world. Speculation on this topic, when the stakes are so high in the middle east, is not unreasonable. It just won’t win you any votes.
