THE DARK HISTORY OF AMERICA.

The following is by Fred Branfman 

“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” --Martin Luther King Jr. “Beyond Vietnam” speech, April 4, 1967

I recently watched all 10 episodes of Oliver Stone's "Untold History of the United States" (on Showtime) [3]. I strongly recommend it to everyone, but particularly to America's young people who have been robbed of a most precious legacy: an understanding of their true history, and thus their future. I can't think of a more meaningful gift to young people for, as Stone says, “history must be remembered or it will be remembered until the meanings are clear." The same U.S. Executive Branch mentality that produced Vietnam is today illegally and inhumanly murdering and weakening U.S. national security interests throughout the Muslim world, and threatening its own citizens as never before. It has never been more urgent to learn from American history.

I am not ashamed to say this series moved me to tears. First, by its depiction of the millions of lives the U.S. Executive Branch has ruined all over the world. This includes over 21 million -- officially estimated -- killed, wounded and made homeless in Indochina and Iraq alone, bring back the most painful memories of my life: my interviews with over 1,000 Lao refugees who reported seeing beloved parents, spouses and children burned alive, buried alive, and shredded to pieces by years of secret, illegal and inhuman U.S. Executive Branch bombing. [Showtime has made available some of the episodes free to watch over the internet [3].]

Second, I was touched by the awful beauty of simply seeing the truth told so clearly and vividly. The combination of the information, the imagery and Stone’s narration touched levels far deeper than the mind.

I was most moved by Episode 7, on the war in Indochina, whose closing words below constitute not only an epitaph for the Vietnam War, but for America itself. I thought of Martin Luther King Jr.'s warning [4] as I watched this segment, which chronicles how U.S. leaders waged aggressive war, killing over 3.4 million Vietnamese according to former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, and hundreds of thousands more Laotians and Cambodians. The U.S. has never apologized for doing so, let alone cleaned up its tens of millions of unexploded bombs and environmental poisons which continue to kill, wound and deform tens of thousands of innocent civilians. The U.S. has never even contemplated paying the reparations it still owes the Indochinese.

I watched this episode after reading Nick Turse’s monumental new book, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam [5], which documents the systematic “industrial-scale” slaughter of Vietnamese civilians by U.S. troops, ordered by top U.S. military officers.

I cannot say that I am surprised that America's political leaders, media and public intellectuals continue to ignore the U.S. Executive's ongoing inhumanity and murder of the innocent -- particularly through its global and spreading drone and ground assassination programs and increasing reliance on the automated warmaking I first saw in Laos 40 years ago. America’s elites are as indifferent to the “mere Muslim Rule” today as they were to the “mere Gook Rule” in Vietnam that Turse so painstakingly documents.

But I am astonished that even those who justify U.S. leaders' actions on the grounds of national security have failed to notice the obvious fact that U.S. warmaking in the 1.8 billion-strong Muslim world is jeopardizing U.S. national security as never before. Just as U.S. backing of the Shah of Iran created a U.S. foreign policy disaster in 1978, the continuation of such policies today will guarantee many more Irans in the future.

Nothing will threaten Americans more in the coming decade than an irrational U.S. foreign policy that, in return for killing a handful of "senior Al Qaeda" leaders (often replaced by more competent deputies), has turned hundreds of millions of Muslims against it including countless potential suicide bombers. This foreign policy has greatly strengthened anti-U.S. forces, destabilized friendly or neutral governments, and as revealed by Wikileaks, vastly increased the danger that materials from Pakistan's nuclear stockpile -- the world's fastest growing and least stable -- will fall into terrorist hands. Today’s U.S. Executive Branch poses a far greater threat [6] to U.S. national security, and to each of us, than to its foes.

Oliver Stone's words below pose basic questions: has Martin Luther King's warning come true? And if so, what can we do to promote the birth of decency, humanity and rationality in this spiritually dead nation of ours?

From Episode 7: "Vietnam, LBJ, Nixon and the Third World: Reversal of Fortune," from Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States”: 

--“The accepted mythology of the time was the U.S. lost the war in Vietnam. But as linguist, historian and philosopher Noam Chomsky has pointed out, 'it's called a loss, a defeat, because they didn't achieve the maximal aims. The maximal aims being turning it into something like the  Philippines. They didn't do that. They did achieve the major aims. It was possible to destroy Vietnam and leave.' Elsewhere he wrote,'South Vietnam had been virtually destroyed,  and the chances that Vietnam would ever be a model for anything had essentially disappeared.'

When an aging and wiser Robert McNamara returned to Vietnam in 1995 he conceded, somewhat in shock, that despite official US estimates of 2 million Vietnamese dead, 3.4 to 3.8 million Vietnamese had perished. In comparison 58,000 Americans died in the fighting and 200,00 were wounded.

The U.S. had destroyed 9,000 of South Vietnam's 15,000 hamlets -- in the north all six industrial cities, 28 of 30 provincial towns, and 96 of 116 district towns. Unexploded ordnance still blankets the countryside. Nineteen million gallons of herbicide had poisoned the environment. Almost all of Vietnam's ancient triple canopy forests are gone. The effects of chemical warfare alone lasted for generations, and could be seen today in the hospital in the South where Agent Orange was used. Dead fetuses kept in jars. Surviving children born with horrid birth defects and deformities. And cancer rates much higher than in the North.

And yet, incredibly, the chief issue in the United States was, for many years, the hunt for 1,300 American soldiers missing in action, a few hundred of them presumed taken as captives by the North Vietnamese. High-grossing action movies were made out of this topic.

No official apology from the United States has ever been issued, and absolutely no appreciation of the suffering of the Vietnamese.

President Bill Clinton finally recognized Vietnam in 1995, 20 years later. Ever since the war American conservatives have struggled to vanquish "the Vietnam Syndrome," which became a catchphrase for Americans' unwillingness to send troops abroad to fight.

For a war that so mesmerized and defined an entire generation, surprisingly little is known about Vietnam today among American youth. This is not accidental. There has been a conscious and systematic effort to erase Vietnam from historical consciousness.

--Reagan: "It is time that we recognized ours was in truth a noble cause. We dishonor the memory of 50,000 young Americans who died in that cause when we give way to feeling of guilt, as if we were doing something shameful."

It was not only conservatives who whitewashed American history. Bill Clinton: "Whatever we may thing about the political decisions of the Vietnam era, the brave Americans who fought and died there had noble motives. They fought for the freedom and the independence of the Vietnamese people."

The outcome has been shrouded in sanitized lies. The Vietnam Veterans' Memorial in Washington, dedicated in November of 1982, now contains the names of 58,272 dead or missing Americans. The message is clear. The tragedy is the death of those Americans. But imagine if the names of 3.8 million Vietnamese and millions of Cambodians and Laotians were also included.

The supposed shame of Vietnam would be finally avenged by Ronald Reagan, the two Bushes and even to an extent Barack Obama, in the two decades to come.

The irony is that the Vietnam war represented a sad climax of the WWII generation from which Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, Bush Sr., and all the generals in the high command came, those proclaimed by the mainstream media in the late 1990s as "the greatest generation."

Yet that same media ignored the arrogance of a generation that, overconfident from WWII, dismissed Vietnam as a fourth-rate power that could be easily defeated. From what the ancient Greeks called hubris or arrogance comes the fall. And from this initially obscure war came a great distortion of economic, social and moral life in America. A civil war that polarized the country till this day -- with much denied, little remembered, nothing regretted, and perhaps, nothing learned.

"History must be remembered or it will be remembered until the meanings are clear." The second president of the United States, John Adams, once said, "Power always thinks it has a great soul and that it is doing God's service when it is violating all his laws."

Which makes the details of the oncoming history a sad, inevitable bloodbath that repeats itself again and again, as the U.S.A., much too often, stood on the side of the oppressors, propping up allies with financial and military aid, war on drugs programs, police and security training, joint military exercises, overseas bases, and occasional direct military intervention.

The U.S. empowered a network of tyrants who were friendly to foreign investors who could exploit cheap labor and native resources on terms favorable to the Empire. Such was the British and French way. And such would be the American way. Not raping, looting Mongols, but rather benign, briefcase-toting, Ivy-league educated bankers, and corporate executives who would loot local economies in the name of modernity, democracy and civilization, to the benefit of the United States and its allies.

During the Cold War politicians and the media sidestepped debate over the basic morality of U.S. foreign policy, by mouthing platitudes about U.S. benevolence and insisting that harsh, even dirty, tactics were needed to fight fire with fire. The Kissingers of the world called it "realpolitik." But even when the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s, our nation's policies did not change, as the U.S. time and again, has taken the side of the entrenched classes or the military against those from below seeking change.

It was the American war against the poor of the earth, the most easily killed, the collateral damage.

As was asked at the beginning, was it really about fighting communism, or was that a misunderstood or disguised motivation?

It was George Kennan, America's leading early Cold War strategist who went to the heart of the matter in a memorandum written in 1948:

"With 50 percent of the world's wealth but only 6% of its population, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity. To do so we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and daydreaming. We should cease to talk about vague and unreal objectives such as human rights, raising of living standards and democratization. We are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are hampered by idealistic slogans the better."

But George Kennan, who died in 2005 at the age of 102 years old, was an intellectual who never sought political office. Never in his wildest dreams could he have imagined the barbaric proportions of the upcoming presidency of Ronald Reagan.”

A challenge to all Muslims out there.

A former Muslim by the name of Ali Sina offered $50,000 to anyone who could, with the help of Islamic texts, disprove the following claims:

"Muhammad is a narcissist, a pedophile, a mass murderer, a terrorist, a misogynist, a lecher, a cult leader, a madman, a rapist, a torturer, an assassin and a looter."

So far the reward has gone unclaimed.

The shocking life of Muhammad and the unpleasant facts about Islam.

The following is taken from thereligionofpeace.com


The Life of Muhammad:
An Inconvenient Truth

Timeline of Muhammad's Life (A.D)

570 - Born in Mecca
576 - Orphaned upon death of mother
595 - Marries Kadijah - older, wealthy widow
610 - Reports first revelations from angel at age of 40
619 - Protector uncle dies
622 - Emigrates from Mecca to Medina (the Hijra)
623 - Orders raids on Meccan caravans
624 - Battle of Badr (victory)
624 - Evicts Qaynuqa Jews from Medina
624 - Orders the assassination of Abu Afak
624 - Orders the assassination of Asma bint Marwan
624 - Orders the assassination of Ka'b al-Ashraf
625 - Battle of Uhud (defeat)
625 - Evicts Nadir Jews
627 - Battle of the Trench (victory)
627 - Massacre of the Qurayza Jews
628 - Signing of the Treaty of Hudaibiya with Mecca
628 - Destruction and subjugation of the Khaybar Jews
629 - Orders first raid into Christian lands at Muta (defeat)
630 - Conquers Mecca by surprise (along with other tribes)
631 - Leads second raid into Christian territory at Tabuk (no battle)
632 - Dies

Introduction

What if a man you knew began telling people that God was routinely speaking to him and only him - and that the "revelations" he claimed to be receiving were mostly about him and his relative importance to all other people?  Say, for example, that this self-proclaimed prophet insisted that God had declared him to be the 'perfect example' for mankind and that others were therefore to accord him with special privilege, unwavering obedience, wealth and earthly desires, including all of the slaves and women that his lust could handle.

Such figures still arise from time to time.  Some of the more dynamic manage to develop a small group of followers so taken with their leader's self assurance that they willingly offer their own children to him for "marriage" or even kill on his behalf if requested.

Would it really validate the message of any such cult leader if his followers did successfully kill and seize the property of anyone who dared disagree?  What if they gradually expanded their power and numbers in such fashion that eventually they were enough to be recognized as a major world religion?  Would that make the cult leader's claims about himself true?  Would it really change the fact that what they believe ultimately sprang from the imagination of a narcissist?

In 610, an Arab salesman with a commanding personality attracted a small cult of credulous fanatics by claiming to be a prophet.  Though his "revelations" were self-referential and occasionally contradicting, he was successful in manipulating his followers with promises of heavenly reward and threat of divine wrath.  The god heard only by him told them to lie and steal for him, to give their children to him for sexual pleasure and, eventually, to gruesomely murder his detractors.

There are two ways to approach a study of Muhammad.  One is with reverence and the other is with skepticism.  Thinking persons choose they latter.  They are not influenced by the number of Muslim believers in the world today or by their force of belief because these are meaningless for determining truth.  They care only about fact.

The facts presented here about the life of Muhammad and the origins of Islam are fully supported by the works of early Muslim biographers upon which all later historians rely.


Origins

To understand Islam, you must understand the harsh circumstances into which the religion was born.  The Arabian Peninsula at the time of Muhammad (b.570 AD) was a barren and desolate region with scorching sun and oppressive heat by day, and chilling cold at night.  There was little vegetative growth, and the nomadic inhabitants lived between jagged rocks and shifting sand dunes.

While Europe and much of the Middle East was transitioning from the Roman to the Byzantine Empire, with roads, irrigation canals, aqueducts, and a culture that included philosophical discourse and theater, the Arabians lived short and brutal lives in warring tribes with little to offer the rest of the world beyond their own harsh existence.

This partly explains Islam's inherent hostility to music and art, which some extremists, such as the Taliban, take quite literally.  Islam does not encourage the pursuit of knowledge outside of itself.  It is, as Oriana Fallaci puts it, it is “the religion which has produced nothing but religion."

The inhospitable climate protected the peninsula from conquest and cultural influence.  No foreign army felt that sheep and goats were worth taking from the desert fighters, so the area was relatively isolated, with the exception of certain trading routes.  The renaissance of knowledge that the rest of the world had been experiencing since the Greek revival was largely missed out on by the Arabs, whose entire energies were devoted to daily survival against the ruthless environment and other tribes.

For these people, morality was dictated merely by necessity, and obligations did not extend beyond one’s tribe.  This is a critical basis for the development of the Islamic attitude toward those outside the faith, including the moral principle that the ethics of any act are determined only by whether or not it benefits Muslims.

There were pagan religious traditions in Arabia, particularly among those based in the trading centers such as Muhammad's birthplace of Mecca.  Some of these towns had Kaabas - cube-like structures that would attract pilgrims during holy months.  The Kaaba at Mecca housed various idols, including the black meteorite that remains to this day.

In addition to the black rock, Muhammad's Quraish tribe worshipped a moon god called Allah.  Other gods were recognized as well.  In fact, the town of Mecca was renowned for religious tolerance, where people of all faiths could come and pray at the Kaaba.  (This would later change once Muhammad gained the power to establish his authority by force).

Islam was created both from these crude pagan practices and from the basic theological elements of Christianity and Judaism as Muhammad [often erroneously] understood them (his inaccurate interpretation of Christianity, for example, is often attributed to an early experience with fringe cults in the Palestinian region, then known as Syria).


Early Life at Mecca

Muhammad was born around 570 AD to a widowed mother who died just six years later.  He grew up poor and orphaned on the margins of society, which was controlled by tribal chiefs and trading merchants.  He worked for his uncle, Abu Talib, as a camel herder.  Although his uncle had some standing in the community, Muhammad himself did not rise above his lowly station until he was 25, when he met and married a wealthy widow, Khadija, who was 15 years older.

His wife's trading business not only nurtured Muhammad's natural talents of persuasion, but it also gave the successful salesman an opportunity to travel and acquire knowledge that was not as accessible to the local population.  He would later use this to his advantage by incorporating the stories that he had come across into his "revelations" from Allah, particularly the tales from the earlier religions, Judaism and Christianity.

Having attained a comfortable lifestyle and the idle time that wealth affords, Muhammad would wander off occasionally for periods of meditation and contemplation.  It is quite likely that he was experiencing the symptoms of a midlife crisis, including a desire for personal accomplishment and meaning.

One day, at the age of 40, he told his wife that he had been visited by the angel Gabriel in a dream.  Thus began a series of "revelations" which lasted almost until his death 23 years later.  The Qur’an is a collection of words that Muhammad attributed to Allah.  The Hadith is a collection of narrations of the life and deeds of Muhammad.  The Sira is his recorded biography.  The Sunnah is said to be Muhammad's way of life, on which Islamic law (Sharia) is based.

With his wife’s influence and support, Muhammad proclaimed himself a prophet in same "lineage" as that of Abraham and Jesus, and began trying to convert those around him to his new religion.  He narrated the Quran to those who believed him, telling them that it was the word of Allah (heard only by himself, of course).

Muhammad's Quran did not contain a single original moral value and it contributed only one new idea to world religion - that Muhammad is Allah's prophet.  In fact, Muhammad's "Allah" seemed oddly preoccupied with making sure Muslims knew to obey Muhammad's every earthly wish, as this mandate is repeated at least twenty times in the narration of the Quran.

In the beginning, Muhammad did his best to compromise his teachings with the predominant beliefs of the community’s elders, such as combining all 300 of their idols under the name “Allah.”  His amalgamation of Judeo-Christian theology and pagan tradition grew more sophisticated over time.  He also used his "revelations from Allah" to repeatedly affirm his own position.  Even if he did not remember the Biblical stories correctly, for example, each one was conspicuously modified to incorporate a common theme: "Believe in the Messenger (Muhammad) or suffer the consequences."


Preaching and Persecution at Mecca

According to early Muslim historians, the Meccans did not mind Muhammad practicing his religion, nor did they feel threatened by his promotion of it.  This changed only after the self-proclaimed prophet began attacking their religion, including the customs and ancestors of the people (Ibn Ishaq/Hisham 167).  This was enough to stir up the resentment of the influential leaders of Mecca, who then mocked his humble background against his pretentious claims.  (See also MYTH: Muhammad was Persecuted for Preaching Islam)

Still, Mecca at the time was a remarkably tolerant society.  Muhammad was allowed to attack the local customs for thirteen years, even though the town's economy depended on the annual pilgrimage attended by visiting pagans, whose religion he actively disparaged.

At first, Muhammad was only successful with friends and family.  After thirteen years, “the street preacher” could boast of only about a hundred determined followers, who called themselves Muslims.  Outside of his wife, his first convert was his young cousin Ali (who would later become his son-in-law and the fourth caliph of Islam).  Another early convert was Abu Bakr, a wealthy merchant whose money and credulous acceptance of Muhammad can be credited with the survival of the fledgling cult.  (Muhammad would later "marry" Abu Bakr's 9-year-old daughter).

Relations with the Meccans turned particularly sour after an episode known as "the Satanic Verses" in which Muhammad agreed to recognize the local gods in addition to Allah.  This delighted the Meccans, who generously extended their welcome.  But Muhammad soon changed his mind after his own people began to lose faith in him.  He claimed that Satan had spoken through him, and he rescinded recognition of the Meccan gods (Tabari 1192, Quran 22:52 &  53:19-26).

The locals intensified their mockery of Muslims and made life particularly difficult for some of them.  Although Muslims today often use the word "persecution" to describe this ordeal (justifiably, in some cases), it is important to note that the earliest and most reliable biographers (Ibn Ishaq and al-Tabari) record the death of only one Muslim during this period, an older woman who died from stress.

This fact is a source of embarrassment to modern apologists, who do not like admitting that Muslims were the first to become violent at Mecca (see MYTH: The Meccans Drew First Blood against Muhammad) and that Muhammad was the first to resort to militancy... and at a later time, when it was entirely unnecessary.

To deal with this unpleasant truth, sympathetic narratives of the early Meccan years usually exaggerate the struggle of the Muslims with claims that they were "under constant torture."  They may also include apocryphal accounts that are unsupported by earliest and most reliable historians (see MYTH: Persecution of Muslims at Mecca - Many Deaths).

Modern storytellers and filmmakers (such as those behind 1976's The Message) have even been known to invent fictional victims of Meccan murder, either to dramatize their own tale or to provide justification for the "revenge killings" that followed.  But, in fact, the only Muslim whose life was truly in danger was that of Muhammad - after 13 years of being allowed to mock the local religion.  (See also MYTH: Muhammad was Tortured at Mecca).


The Hijra - Flight from Mecca to Medina

The death of his uncle, Abu Talib, in 619 left Muhammad without a protector against the Meccan leadership, which was gradually losing patience with him.  The true agitator in this situation, however, is quite clearly Muhammad himself, as even Muslim historians note.  Consider this account of what happened at Abu Talib's deathbed, as the Meccans implored him a final time for peace with his nephew:

[Muhammad's chief adversary] Abu Sufyan, with other sundry notables, went to Abu Talib and said: "You know the trouble that exists between us and your nephew, so call him and let us make an agreement that he will leave us alone and we will leave him alone; let him have his religion and we will have ours." (Ibn Ishaq 278)

Muhammad rejected the offer of peaceful co-existence.  His new religion was obviously intended to dominate the others, not be on equal standing with them.  Meanwhile, the Muslims were beginning to become violent with the people around them.

Muhammad's search for political alliance led him to make a treaty of war against the Meccans with the people of Medina, another Arab town far to the north (Ibn Ishaq 299-301).  This was the last straw for the Meccans, who finally decided to capture Muhammad and put him to death.  (see also MYTH: Muhammad and his Muslims Fled Mecca because of Persecution)

Although this sounds harsh against Western standards, it is important to note the contrast between the Meccan reaction and that of Muhammad when he had the opportunity to deal with perceived treachery in Medina at a later date on the part of those who hadn't even harmed anyone.

The Meccans limited their deadly aggression to Muhammad himself.  This is quite clear from the episode in which Muhammad escapes his home by using his son-in-law, Ali, to trick his would-be assassins into thinking that they had him trapped (Ibn Ishaq 326).  No harm was done to Ali or his wife, both of whom subsequently remained in the city for several days to complete the transfer of Muhammad's family business to Medina.

Compare this to the episode of the Banu Qurayza (below), in which Muhammad slaughtered an entire tribe of people based on their leader having switched loyalties in a conflict in which none of them even participated.

The year that Muhammad fled Mecca for Medina was 622, which marks the beginning of the Muslim calendar.


Medina and the Origin of Jihad

Stinging from the rejection of his own town and tribe, Muhammad's message quickly become more intolerant and ruthless - particularly as he gained power.  Islam's holiest book clearly reflects this contrast, with the later parts of the Quran adding  violence and earthly defeats at the hands of Muslims to the woes of eternal damnation that the earlier parts of the book promises those who will not believe in Muhammad.

It was at Medina that Islam evolved from a relatively peaceful religion borrowed from others and into a military force that was intended to govern all aspects of society.  During these last ten years of Muhammad's life, infidels were evicted or enslaved, converted upon point of death and even rounded up and slaughtered depending on expediency.

To fund his quest for control, Muhammad first directed his followers to raid Meccan caravans in the holy months, when the victims would least expect it.  This was despite the fact that the Meccans were not bothering him in Medina (see MYTH: Muhammad and his Muslims were Persecuted by the Meccans at Medina).

Muhammad provided his people with convenient revelations "from Allah" which allowed them to murder innocent drivers and steal their property (Ibn Ishaq/Hisham 426).  The people around him gradually developed a lust for things that could be taken in battle, including material comforts and captured women and children.  (See also MYTH: Muhammad Raided Caravans to Retrieve Stolen Property).

Often the people captured in battle would be brought before the self-proclaimed prophet, where they would plead for their lives, arguing, for example, that they would never have treated the Muslims that way.  The traditions are quite clear in portraying Muhammad as largely unmoved by their pleas, and ordering their deaths anyway, often by horrible means.  In one case, he orders a man slain, telling him that “Hell” will take care of the poor fellow’s orphaned daughter (Ishaq 459).  (See also MYTH: Muhammad Never Killed Captives)

The raids on caravans preceded the first major battle involving a Muslim army, the Battle of Badr.  This was the spot where the Meccans had sent their own army to protect their caravans from Muslim raiders.  Although, Muslims today like to claim that they only attack others in self-defense, this was clearly not the case in Muhammad's time.  In fact, he had to compel his reluctant warriors with promises of paradise and assurances that their religion was more important than the lives of others.  (See also MYTH: The Battle of Badr was Defensive).


The Consolidation of Power

Muhammad defeated the Meccan army at Badr, which emboldened him to begin dividing and conquering the three local Jewish tribes at Medina.  Their mistake was to accept the Muslim presence, but reject Muhammad's claim that he was in the line of Jewish prophets.  His stories from the Torah simply did not agree with their own.  (Muhammad's recited version of Bible stories sounds more like fragmented fairy tales with the same moral - believe in his personal claim to be a prophet or else).

How these three tribes, the Banu Qaynuqa, the Banu Nadir, and the Banu Quyrayza met their fate is insightful into the Muslim mindset, which employs an inherent double standard in its relations with those outside the faith.

First, to try and gain their favor, Muhammad briefly preached that Christians and Jews could attain salvation through their own faith.  In fact, he changed his followers' direction for prayer from Mecca to Jerusalem, which prompted the Jews' tolerance of him while he worked surreptitiously for the power to evict them.  These earlier concessions and teachings were later revoked by Muhammad, since the Jews ultimately refused his religion.  The rare early verses of tolerance in the Quran are abrogated by later verses such as 9:29.

The Jews' knowledge of the Torah naturally threatened the Muslim leader's credibility, since it easily refuted the claims that he made about himself as a prophet of God.  They also saw through the Biblical narrations that he had picked up from secondhand sources and knew that these contradicted established revelation.  Conveniently, Allah stepped in to tell Muhammad that the Jews had deliberately corrupted their own texts to hide the very evidence of his own prophethood that he had previously insisted existed.  (To this day, Muslims have never been able to produce a copy of the "true" Torah or Gospel to which their own Quran refers).

While the Jews remained unconvinced by such obvious gimmickry, Arab polytheists converted to Islam in large numbers, which soon gave Muhammad the power to make his intentions clear that Islam would be imposed by force:

While we were in the Mosque, the Prophet came out and said, "Let us go to the Jews" We went out till we reached Bait-ul-Midras. He said to them, "If you embrace Islam, you will be safe. You should know that the earth belongs to Allah and His Apostle, and I want to expel you from this land. So, if anyone amongst you owns some property, he is permitted to sell it, otherwise you should know that the Earth belongs to Allah and His Apostle."  Bukhari 53:392

The Jews of Mecca were the first in a very long line of unfortunate people to be offered the opportunity to convert to Islam under obvious duress.  Forcible conversion is very much a Muslim tradition started by Muhammad (see MYTH: Muhammad Rejected Conversions to Islam made under Duress)

Since they chose to hold on to their religion (and their property) Muhammad looked for reasons to go to war against the Jews at Medina.  According to some Muslims, the first tribe, the Qaynuqa, were driven from their homes and land on the pretext that one of their own had harassed a Muslim woman.  Although the offender was killed prior to this by a Muslim, the Muslim was also killed by Jews in retaliation for the first murder.

After laying siege to the entire community and defeating the tribe, Muhammad wanted to put every male member to death, but was talked out of it by an associate - something that Allah later "rebuked" him for.  The Qaynuqa were forced into exile and the Muslims took their possessions and property, making it their own.  Muhammad personally reserved a fifth of the ill-gotten gain for himself (a rule that he was sure to include in the Quran).

This episode helped ingrain within Islam the immature principle of group identity, whereby any member of a religion or social unit outside of Islam is just as guilty as any of their peers who insult or harm a Muslim - and just as deserving of punishment.  (Muhammad's punishments usually did not fit the crime).

Members of the second tribe, the Banu Nadir, were accused by Muhammad of plotting to kill him.  What is most intriguing about this episode is that it occurred after the Muslims had killed several prominent Jews on Muhammad's order, including a leader of the Banu Nadir (named Ka'b al-Ashraf).  (See also MYTH: Muhammad Never Approved of Murder)

When the prophet of Islam learned that he might be targeted in retaliation (something that he claimed was "revealed" to him by Allah), he promptly laid siege to the Banu Nadir community.  After forcing them to surrender, these original inhabitants of Medina were then banished from their homes and land by the Muslim newcomers, who again started to take as much as they could for themselves (Ibn Ishaq 653).  (To the disappointment of his people, this time Muhammad produced a revelation from Allah that allowed him to confiscate the entire portion for himself).

In a critical example of how deception is sanctioned under Islam, a surviving contingent of the Banu Nadir (under Usayr ibn Zarim) was later tricked into leaving their fortress by promise of peace talks.  The contingent of Muslims sent by Muhammad to "escort" them, however, easily slaughtered the victims once they let down their guard (Ibn Ishaq 981).   (See also MYTH: Muhammad always Disapproved of Dishonesty).


The Qurayza Massacre

By the time the Banu Qurayza met their fate, Muhammad was wealthy and powerful from his defeat of the other two tribes.

The Jews of the Banu Qurayza tasted Muhammad's wrath after their leader half-heartedly sided with the Meccan army during a siege of Medina (the Battle of the Trench).  By then, Muhammad had evicted the other Jews and declared that all land at Medina belonged to him, so the original constitution of the town was no longer in effect.  It is important to note that the Qurayza did not attack the Muslims, even after switching loyalties (contrary to another popular myth).

Although the Qurayza surrendered peacefully to the Muslims, Muhammad determined to have every man of the tribe executed, along with every boy that had reached the initial stages of puberty (between the ages of 12 and 14).  He ordered a ditch dug outside of the town and had the victims brought to him in several groups.  Each person would be forced to kneel, and their head would be cut off and then dumped along with the body into the trench.

Between 700 and 900 men and boys were slaughtered by the Muslims after their surrender.

The surviving children of the men became slaves of the Muslims, and their widows became sex slaves.  This included the Jewish girl, Rayhana, who became one of Muhammad's personal concubines the very night that her husband was killed.  The prophet of Islam apparently "enjoyed her pleasures" (ie. raped her) even as the very execution of her people was taking place.

In some ways, women were much like any other possession taken in battle, to be done with however their captors pleased.  But Muslims found them useful in other ways as well.  In fact, one of the methods by which Islam owed its expansion down through the centuries was through the reproductive capabilities of captured women.  In addition to four wives, a man was allowed an unlimited number of sex slaves, with the only rule being that any resulting children would automatically be Muslim.

Muhammad ordered that a fifth of the women taken captive be reserved for him.  Many were absorbed into his personal stable of sex slaves that he maintained in addition to his eleven wives.  Others were doled out like party favors to others.  (See MYTH: Muhammad was an Abolitionist)

At one point following a battle, Muhammad provided instructions on how women should be raped after capture, telling his men not to worry about coitus interruptus, since "Allah has written whom he is going to create."  (See also MYTH: Muhammad Never Approved of Rape)

Following the battle against the Hunain, late in his life, Muhammad's men were reluctant to rape the captured women in front of their husbands (who were apparently still alive to witness the abomination), but Allah came to the rescue with a handy "revelation" that allowed the debauchery.  (This is the origin of Sura 4:24 according to Abu Dawud 2150).


The Origin of Islamic Imperialism

From Medina, Muhammad waged a campaign of terror, to which he openly attributed his success (Bukhari 52:220).  His gang of robbers launched raids in which hapless communities were savaged, looted, murdered and raped.  The tribes around the Muslims began to convert to Islam out of self-preservation.

The excuse for military campaign began to shrink to the point that it hardly existed at all.  Muhammad told his followers that Muslims were meant to rule over other people.  Supremacist teachings became the driving force behind Jihad (see also MYTH: Muhammad Waged War Only in Self-Defense) and Jihad became the driving force behind Islam.

The brutal conquest of the people of Khaybar, a peaceful farming community that was not at war with the Muslims, is a striking example.  Muhammad marched in secret, took them by surprise and easily defeated them.  He had many of the men killed, simply for defending their town.  He enslaved women and children and had surviving men live on the land as virtual serfs, paying Muslims an ongoing share of their crops not to attack them again.

Muhammad suspected that the town's treasurer was holding out and had his men barbarically torture the poor fellow by building a fire on his chest until he revealed the location of hidden treasure.  (See also MYTH: Muhammad Never Approved Torture).

Afterwards, the prophet of Islam beheaded the man and "married" his widow on the same day (she first had to pass through the hands of one of his lieutenants).  Given that the woman's father was also killed by Muhammad, it isn't much of a stretch to say that true love had very little to do with this "marriage."


A Life of Hedonism and Narcissism

Muhammad's personal life became the picture of hedonism and excess, all justified by frequent “revelations” from an increasingly arbitrary and capricious god   In his later years, he frequently used his influence for purely personal goals, including sex, wealth and power.  Allah's authority for him to pursue these earthly ambitions is even immortalized in the Quran (suras 33 and 66, particularly).

The same man who earlier in his career had justified his claims as a prophet by saying that he "asked for no reward" from others, reversed course and began to demand a fifth or more of all booty taken from conquered tribes.  According to his biographers, he became fat from living off this enormous share of ill-gotten gain.  (See also MYTH: Muhammad was a Brave Warrior who Trusted in Allah to Protect him)

In the span of a dozen years, he married eleven women and had access to an array of sex slaves (see MYTH: Muhammad Married Multiple Women as a Favor to them).  When he wanted a woman, even if she were the wife of another man, his own daughter-in-law, or a child as young as 6-years-old (see MYTH: Muhammad Condemned Pedophilia), Muhammad was able to justify his lust and inevitable consummation with an appeal to Allah’s revealed will for his sex life - which was then preserved forever in the Quran, to be faithfully memorized by future generations for whom it has no possible relevance.

The first verse of Sura 66 is a good example of this.  It was narrated by Muhammad to his wives shortly after two of them pressured him into not visiting a favorite sex slave:

O Prophet! why do you forbid (yourself) that which Allah has made lawful for you, seeking to please your wives?  (Quran 66:1)
Allah (according to Muhammad) was so upset with his prophet for denying himself an afternoon of pleasure with the concubine that Allah had provided for him that it was a good thing for Muhammad that Allah was a forgiving and merciful god!  (For the Muslim faithful, it must surely be a source of embarrassment that Allah evidently had more interest in Muhammad's personal sex life than he did about tolerance or universal love.  The god of Islam encourages sex with slaves in several other places as well).

Muhammad used eternal paradise and damnation to solicit strict obedience to his every command: "Allah’s Apostle said, ‘Whoever obeys me will enter Paradise, and whoever disobeys me will not enter it’” (Bukhari 92.384).

Islam became centered completely around its founder.  Of all the prophets, new converts are required to affirm only the legitimacy of Muhammad.  The Muslim leader even shares the Shahada with Allah ("There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is his messenger").  To this day, every Muslim must bow down five times a day "toward" Muhammad's birthplace (Islam's "prophet" did not know the earth was round).

The prophet of Islam was also an extremely superstitious person, leaving many bizarre rules for Muslims to follow, including which direction they should defecate and how many stones they should wash their anus with afterwards (any odd number... for anyone who's curious).  (See also MYTH: Muhammad did Away with Superstition).  Sketchy hygiene apparently left him with an annoying lice infection.

Not content with waiting for Allah to act on his behalf, Muhammad had personal critics executed, including poets.  One of these was a mother of five children, who was stabbed to death by Muhammad's envoy after a suckling infant was removed from her breast (see MYTH: Muhammad Never Killed Women).  Other innocent people were killed merely because they were of a different religion, sometimes including children (see MYTH: Muhammad Never Killed Children).

The glaring double standards of Islam were ingrained by the prophet of Islam during his lifetime.  This included commands to execute apostates (those who wish to leave Islam) and evict people of other religions from their homes.

An elderly woman named Umm Qirfa once ran afoul of Muhammad merely by fighting back when her tribe was targeted by Muslim raiders.  Muhammad's adopted son tied the woman's legs separately to two camels, then set the camels off in opposite directions, tearing the woman's body in two.  He also killed her two sons - presumably in gruesome fashion - and made her daughter into a sex slave.  (See also MYTH: Muhammad Never Killed the Elderly).

Today's Muslims inherit this legacy of self-consumption and disregard for those outside the faith.  They may or may not agree with terrorist attacks on non-Muslims, but they are nearly united in their belief that the victims have no right to strike back, even if it is in self-defense.

The Quran distinguishes Muslims from others, bestowing the highest praise for believers while heaping the vilest condemnation on those outside the faith.  Islam is a true supremacist ideology.  (See also Is the Quran Hate Speech?)


The Taking of Mecca

Though many of the Arab and Jewish tribes were eliminated and absorbed through military victory and forced conversion, the city of Mecca remained.

In 628, six years after fleeing, Muhammad’s followers were allowed to re-enter the city under an agreement whereby he set aside his title as “Prophet of Allah.”  This was a temporary ploy that enabled him to gain a political foothold in the city through the same “fifth column” activities that are still used today by organizations such as the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), which use their host’s language of religious tolerance to disguise an ulterior agenda that includes systematic discrimination against non-Muslims.

Many of his followers were disappointed that Muhammad had made concessions to the Meccans, not understanding how it actually fit perfectly with his ultimate agenda of domination.  It was during this time that he led the campaign against the Khaybar, to assuage their lust for blood, women and loot.

Technically, Muhammad was the first to break the treaty with the Meccans when he violated the portion of it that restricted him from accepting members of the other tribe into his camp.  His own people also staged deadly raids on Meccan caravans (see MYTH: The Meccans were the First to Break the Treaty of Hudaibiya).  Although he evidently had no personal obligation to the treaty, the prophet of Islam held the other party to the letter of the law, particularly after he amassed the power to conquer in overwhelming fashion.

The excuse that Muhammad eventually used to march his armies into Mecca was provided when a tribe allied to the Meccans conducted a raid on a tribe allied with the Medinans.  Although a true man of peace would have heeded the fact that his enemy did not want war, and used non-violent means to resolve the tension while respecting sovereignty, Muhammad merely wanted power and vengeance.  (See also MYTH: Muhammad always Chose Peace over War).

In just under a decade, Muhammad had evolved from trying to sell himself as a Judeo-Christian prophet, seeking followers, to an Arab warlord, seeking subjects, slaves and total dominance.  The early Quran (of Mecca) tells unbelievers to 'follow the example' of Muhammad or suffer Hell.  The later Quran (of Medina) tells unbelievers to 'obey' Muhammad or suffer death.

Following Mecca's surrender, Muhammad put to death those who had previously insulted him (see also MYTH: Muhammad was a Forgiving Man).  One of the persons sentenced was his former scribe, who had written revelations that Muhammad said were from Allah.  The scribe had previously recommended changes to the wording that Muhammad offered (based on some of the bad grammar and ineloquent language of "Allah") and Muhammad agreed.  This caused the scribe to apostatize, based on his belief that real revelations should have been immutable.

Although the scribe escaped death by "converting to Islam" at the point of a sword, others weren't so lucky.  One was a slave girl who was executed on Muhammad's order because she had written songs mocking him.

In what would also become the model for future Muslim military conquests, those Meccans who would not convert to Islam were required to accept third-class status.  Not surprisingly, almost the entire city - which had previously rejected his message - immediately "converted" to Islam once Muhammad came back with a sword in this hand.  This included has adversary, Abu Sufyan, who was bluntly ordered to "Submit and testify that there is no God but Allah and that Muhammad is the apostle of Allah before you lose your head."

Those who would not convert to Islam were banned from the city a few months later - again underscoring the dual ethics of Islam.  When Muhammad was previously banned from Mecca, he described it as a "persecution" that justified his "slaughter" of those who prevented him from performing the Haj.  Yet, when he attained power, he immediately chased anyone who would not convert to Islam from Mecca and prevented them from performing the Haj.

To this day, people of other religions are barred even from entering Mecca, the city where Muhammad was free to preach in contradiction to the established religion.  Islam is far less tolerant even than the more primitive Arab religion that it supplanted.  A person preaching the original Arab polytheism on the streets of Mecca today would be quickly executed.


Jihad and Jizya

Tellingly, some of the most violent verses in the Quran were handed down following Muhammad's ascension to power, when there was no threat to the Muslim people.  The 9th Sura of the Quran exhorts Muslims to Jihad and dominance over other religions:

"Fight those who do not believe in Allah, nor in the latter day, nor do they prohibit what Allah and His Messenger have prohibited, nor follow the religion of truth, out of those who have been given the Book, until they pay the tax in acknowledgment of superiority and they are in a state of subjection."  (9:29)

The verse that follows curses Christians and Jews by name and says "May Allah destroy them" (as with other sections of the Quran, it is unclear whether it is Allah or Muhammad speaking).

Before his death, Muhammad ordered 30,000 men to march on Christian lands (which were Byzantine at the time).  It is possible that he believed false rumors of an army amassed against him, but there is absolutely no evidence of such a force having been assembled.  Instead, Muhammad subjugated the local people and extorted "protection" money from them - something that has come to be known as the jizya (a tax that non-Muslims pay to Muslims).

Another episode from this period that offers insight into the legacy of Muhammad is the forced conversion of the al-Harith, one of the last Arab tribes to hold out against Muslim hegemony.  Muhammad gave the chief of the tribe three days to accept Islam before sending his army to destroy them.

Not surprisingly, the entire people immediately embraced the Religion of Peace!

Most Arab tribes recognized Muhammad's quest for power and wisely pledged their political allegiance without a fight.  This quickly presented a problem for his core band of followers, however, since they had become used to living off of what could be stolen from others via raids and battle.

Since it was against the rules to attack fellow Muslims, Muhammad began demanding tribute from his new "converts" instead, but this proved to be less profitable than the jizya - not to mention that it carried the risk of internal resentment and strife.

Khaybar, the remote Jewish city that had been turned into a sharecropper state on behalf of its Muslim masters was a more preferable economic model for a growing Islamic empire that had become dependent on extortion justified by religious superiority.

Years before attacking Christian and Persian lands, Muhammad wrote to governors in each, telling them, "embrace Islam and you will be safe."  There was no mention of oppression or liberation cited as a justification.  The only threat these people faced would be from Muslim armies.  (Only six years later, 4,000 peasants in the modern-day Palestinian region would be slaughtered for defending their homes).

At the time, the wealth of other nations was an open source of envy among Muhammad's followers, which he promised to rectify.  The subsequent military expansion that he set in motion may have been sanctioned by Allah and powered by religious zealotry, but the underlying motives of money, sex, slaves and power were no less worldly than any other conqueror of the time.


The Legacy of Islamic Imperialism

Muhammad died of a fever in 632 at the age of 63, with his violent religion spread over most of Arabia.  His method of forcing others to convert under duress had several negative consequences, beginning with the civil wars that were immediately engaged in following his death.  Many tribes wanted out of Islam and had to be kept in the empire via horrific violence.

Abu Sufyan, the Meccan leader who was literally forced to "embrace" Islam at the point of a sword actually had the last laugh.  He skillfully worked his own family into the line of succession and his son, Muawiya, became the heir to Muhammad's empire at the expense of the prophet's own family.  In fact, Abu Sufyan almost lived to witness his son and grandson kill off Muhammad's own grandchildren and assume control of the Islamic empire.

Muhammad's failure to leave a clear successor resulted in a deep schism that quickly devolved into violence and persists to this day as the Sunni/Shia conflict.  His own family fell apart and literally went to war with each other in the first few years.  Thousands of Muslims were killed fighting each other in a battle between Muhammad's favorite wife, Aisha, and his adopted son, Ali.

Infidels fared no better.  Through Muhammad's teachings and example, his followers viewed worldly life as a constant physical battle between the House of Peace (Dar al-Salaam) and the House of War (Dar al-Harb).  Muslims are instructed to invite their enemies to either embrace Islam, pay jizya (protection money), or die.

Over the next fourteen centuries, the bloody legacy of this extraordinary individual would be a constant challenge to those living on the borders of the Islam’s political power.  The violence that Muslim armies would visit on people across North Africa, the Middle East, Europe and into Asia as far as the Indian subcontinent is a tribute to a founder who practiced and promoted subjugation, rape, murder and forced conversion.

In Muhammad's words: "I have been ordered to fight the people till they say: 'None has the right to be worshipped but Allah.' And if they say so, pray like our prayers, face our Qibla and slaughter as we slaughter, then their blood and property will be sacred to us and we will not interfere with them..."  (Bukhari 8:387)

It is certainly the basis not just for modern day terror campaigns against Western infidels (and Hindus and Buddhists) but also the broad apathy that Muslims across the world have to the violence, which is an obvious enabler.

As Indonesian cleric, Abu Bakar Bashir recently put it, "If the West wants to have peace, then they have to accept Islamic rule."

Shocking Story of How the US Ignored International Law to Become World's Kidnapper and Torturer

The following is an excerpt from  A Secret History of Torture [3] (Counterpoint Press, 2012). 

Two days after the 9/11 attacks, during a meeting of Bush’s closest advisers, Cofer Black declared the country’s enemies must be left with ‘flies walking across their eyeballs’. It was an image of death so striking that Black became known among the President’s inner circle as ‘the flies on the eyeballs guy’. Unlike its allies – the UK, France, Spain and Israel – the US had little experience of serious terrorist attacks on its own territory, nor any understanding of the need for a patient response. Bush was impressed by Black. Colin Powell, the Secretary of State, could see that the President wanted to kill somebody. The problem, as successive attorneys general had warned one president after another, was that they did not enjoy unfettered powers of life and death over the nation’s enemies. The CIA had been banned from carrying out assassinations since 1976.
The President turned to his Department of Defense and found that it had no cogent, off-the-shelf plan for responding to an attack of this nature on the United States. The CIA, on the other hand, did have something in its arsenal: it had the rendition program.
Since 1987, the CIA had been quietly apprehending terrorists and ‘rendering’ them to the US for prosecution, without any regard for lawful extradition processes. In 1995, President Bill Clinton – apparently with the full encouragement of his vice-president, Al Gore – agreed that a number of terrorists could be taken to a third country, including countries known to use torture, a process that would come to be known as extraordinary rendition.
Mike Scheuer, the CIA officer who started that programme, faced few objections from Clinton’s national security advisers when he began taking prisoners to Egypt, where they could be interrogated under torture. ‘They just didn’t want to know what we were doing,’ he says.
Before 9/11, however, there were limits. In 1998, for example, the CIA had drawn up a plan to kidnap Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan and take him to Egypt. A shipping container was installed inside a Hercules aircraft and inside that was bolted a dentist’s chair fitted with restraints. The CIA were all ready to go when, at the last moment, the FBI persuaded Clinton’s attorney general, Janet Reno, that bin Laden’s inevitable death at the hands of the Egyptians would be an act of murder and that US officials would be responsible. Reno vetoed the plan.
By 13 September, with a still-unknown number of Americans dead and the President wanting action, all such legal squeamishness had vanished. President Bush and Dick Cheney both believed al-Qaida had succeeded because government lawyers had been expecting the CIA to do its job with one hand tied behind its back. Bush said as much to his attorney general, John Ashcroft, when he warned him: ‘Don’t ever let this happen again.’ So when the head of the FBI, Robert Mueller, went to brief the President a few days after 9/11 and began to talk of the need to gather evidence for future prosecutions, he was promptly silenced by Ashcroft. Prosecutions were beside the point, Ashcroft said. All that mattered was stopping another attack.
That night, Cofer Black locked himself away at his office at Langley and within five days had drawn up plans for the CIA’s response. It would entail a vast expansion of the rendition programme. Hundreds of al-Qaida suspects would be tracked down and abducted from their homes and hiding places in eighty different countries. The agency would decide who was to be killed and who was to be kept alive in a network of secret prisons, outside the US, where they would be systematically tormented until every one of their secrets had been delivered up. The United States had been blindsided by al-Qaida on 9/11 and that situation would not be permitted to occur a second time.
Black’s plan was presented to the President and his war cabinet in a series of meetings during the days after the attacks. On Monday 17 September, Bush signed off the paperwork: with a stroke of his pen the CIA was granted the power of life and death over al-Qaida suspects and could arrange for men to be detained and tortured indefinitely. All this, Bush later said, was to remain invisible.
A few hours afterwards there was a brief glimpse of the manner in which the United States would disregard the restraints of international law when responding to the attacks. Speaking at a press conference, Bush said: ‘There’s an old poster out West that says, “Wanted: Dead or Alive.”’ The President then checked himself before saying that those responsible for the murderous attacks should be brought to justice.
Cofer Black’s master plan had already been presented to the CIA’s closest overseas allies. The evening before Bush signed off, Black and a handful of other senior CIA officers went to the British embassy on Washington’s Massachusetts Avenue, where they told senior British intelligence officers what was about to happen.
At the end of Black’s three-hour presentation, his opposite number at MI6, Mark Allen, commented dryly that it all sounded ‘rather blood-curdling’. Allen also expressed concern that once the Americans had ‘hammered the mercury in Afghanistan’, al-Qaida would simply scatter across South Asia and the Middle East, destabilising entire regions. Black was dressed in the same suit he had been wearing five days earlier and was clearly exhausted, but he appeared to relish the vicious retaliation he had planned. He told Allen that all the CIA cared about at that moment was killing terrorists. One of the CIA officers at the meeting, Tyler Drumheller, could see that while the British appeared laid-back, ‘it was clear they were worried, and not without reason’. According to one account, even Black joked that one day they might all be prosecuted. But the CIA’s closest ally had been put on notice: the British could never honestly claim that they did not know what was about to unfold.
Shortly afterwards Allen departed for London, where Blair and Foreign Secretary Jack Straw were waiting to be briefed on the Americans’ plans.
At the end of September 2001, the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 1373, which required member states to do more to assist the US and each other in eliminating international terrorism and called for a series of measures ‘in conformity with the relevant provisions of national and international law’.
The need to maintain a lawful response to the horrors of the al-Qaida attacks was stressed again and again throughout the resolution, but it was already too late. By then, Dick Cheney had said publicly that the United States was going to ‘work through sort of the dark side’ and that ‘it’s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective’.
On 2 October, members of NATO met at the organisation’s headquarters at Brussels and agreed that they should invoke Article Five of the North Atlantic Treaty, under which an attack on one member is to be regarded as an attack on all. At a second meeting two days later, the US representatives presented a number of specific requests, all of which were granted in a series of agreement documents that the US had itself drafted. Eight of those requests have since been made public. They included enhanced intelligence sharing, taking ‘necessary measures to increase security’ and granting blanket over-flight clearances for the United States and other allies’ aircraft for military flights engaged in counterterrorism operations. However, NATO has since admitted that a number of other requests were granted; all of them remain secret.
By now, the US had a broad agreement from its key allies that it would conduct its ‘war on terror’ in line with Cofer Black’s secret plan. What this would involve was spelled out in further detail at a subsequent meeting of the heads of the intelligence agencies of the US, UK, Canada, New Zealand and Australia. These men and women gather once every year to discuss signals intelligence-sharing arrangements, and after 9/11 it was New Zealand’s turn to play host. The venue was a house on the edge of the small South Island resort town of Queenstown.
The threat posed by al-Qaida, Tenet is said to have told the gathered spy chiefs, ‘is a challenge which redefines the way we work, the way we think, the way we act’. The CIA would accept no restraints and would in future work with the intelligence agencies of any nation. ‘Without them, and their help, we have no fucking global effort,’ the head of the CIA is said to have declared. ‘We’d be walking through the Arab world wide open and half blind.’ As far as the CIA was concerned, he said, ‘the shackles, my friends, have been taken off ’. And the CIA must not be alone in working closely with the intelligence agencies of the Arab world: ‘We must work as one.’
Cofer Black used similar terms during a subsequent Congressional inquiry into the 9/11 attacks when asked about the degree of freedom given to the CIA. ‘All I want to say is that there was “before” 9/11 and “after” 9/11,’ he said. ‘After 9/11 the gloves come off.’
By November 2001, with the supercharged rendition programme about to go live, Bush issued a barely concealed threat to those allies who failed to offer anything less than full cooperation. At a press conference before a White House dinner with President Chirac of France, Bush said: ‘A coalition partner must do more than just express sympathy. A coalition partner must perform. It’s going to be important for nations to know they will be held accountable for inactivity. Either you’re with us or you’re against us in the fight against terror.’
Chirac offered the view that it was Resolution 1373 that set out the obligations of member states. Bush, clearly unimpressed, decided the press conference was over. ‘The soup’s getting cold,’  he said.
Exactly what was required of America’s allies in the fight against terror soon began to emerge. On the evening of 18 December, Paul Forell, a uniformed officer of the Swedish Border Police, watched as two cars pulled up outside his office at Bromma airport in Stockholm. A group of plain-clothes officers of the Säkerhetspolisen, the security service, walked into the office and informed him that a deportation operation was under way. Ten minutes later two more men arrived. They gave Forell their first names and said they were from the US embassy. As they were speaking, a US-registered Gulfstream V jet touched down and began to taxi towards Forell’s office. Some of the Säkerhetspolisen men went to greet it.
They returned with eight people: six Americans and two Egyptians. One of the Americans was a doctor. All of them were dressed in black and wearing black masks with small eye-holes. The visitors went to the parked cars and brought from them two handcuffed men: terrorism suspects Mohammed al-Zery and Ahmed Agiza.
The two prisoners were stripped and searched carefully. Their clothes were cut into pieces and placed in bags. Their hair, mouths and ears were carefully examined. Sedatives were administered by anal suppositories and they were put into nappies. They were then dressed in overalls, handcuffed again and leg irons were locked around their ankles. Then they were photographed and hoods without eye-holes were placed over their heads. Throughout this process the men in masks talked rapidly to each other in low voices. The two prisoners were walked to the Gulfstream and strapped onto mattresses at the rear of the aircraft, which immediately took off for Cairo.
Forell had witnessed one of the first of Cofer Black’s extraordinary rendition operations. Two men had been abducted from a European capital and taken to the Middle East to be interrogated.
Over the next few years, scenes like this would be repeated hundreds of times across the world. Men were rendered not only from the war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq but from Kenya, Pakistan, Indonesia, Somalia, Bosnia, Croatia, Albania, Gambia, Zambia, Thailand and the United States itself. The US was running a global kidnapping programme on the basis of Cofer Black’s plan and the agreements reached at October’s NATO meeting.
Some prisoners were dispatched to Middle Eastern countries, including Jordan and Syria, or to Afghanistan and Uzbekistan. An unknown number were sent to secret prisons that the CIA operated in Thailand, Poland, Lithuania and Romania. Wherever the prisoners ended up, however, they had one thing in common: they were going to be tortured.
On arrival in Egypt, al-Zery and Agiza were taken to the Tora Prison complex, fourteen miles south of Cairo, where they began immediately to suffer appalling abuse. Agiza subsequently appeared before an Egyptian court and was jailed for fifteen years. Almost two years after being rendered, al-Zery was released without charge after the Egyptian authorities accepted what he had always protested: that he had never advocated violence. He was then able to tell how he had been hooded continuously during his first two months of imprisonment and had suffered electric shocks on his genitals, nipples and ears. His first year of imprisonment was spent in a cell less than five feet square.