July 17, 2004

(Via Kurt Nimmo): John Yoo, one of the little legal beavers who helped the White House craft its infamous torture memos and develop the novel legal theory that the "Commander-in-Chief" cannot be restrained by any law whatsover, comes out into the open with one of the Bush Faction's darker purposes in a recent Los Angeles Times column. Yoo, justifier of torture and military autocracy, is now actually teaching young people about the law, but he took time out from his busy schedule tainting impressionable minds to pen a piece in which, among other things, he calls for the United States to set up "fake" terrorist organizations, complete with its own websites, recruitment centers, training camps and fundraising operations." This group would also launch "fake" terrorist attacks. The idea, we're told, is to sow confusion among al Qaeda's ranks.

Yoo presents this as a new idea; it is nothing of the sort, of course. What he is doing is laying the groundwork for the public acceptance of a practice that is already going on -- much as administration insiders floated stories about the "possible" use of torture and "taking the gloves off" and "rendering" prisoners to torture states in the first months after 9/11, saying that such things "might" be necessary, when they were already taking place on a wide, systematic scale. Just as the ostensibly hypothetical torture plans were actually existing realities, so too with Yoo's "suggestion."

I first wrote about the Bush plans to set up its own terrorist organizations in November 2002. And it was clear from the plans revealed then -- by William Arkin -- that such groups needn't confine themselves to "fake" operations. Indeed, the plan called for Pentagon operatives to also penetrate existing groups and "provoke terrorists into action." There is simply no way of knowing which of the countless terrorist attacks that have beset the world since then can be traced back to these groups and operatives.