Pentagon Course Taught Islam is the Enemy, Suggested Hiroshima-type Solution for Mecc

Like people in my country usually say, no matter how deep the evil things hidden beneath the lies, the truth will always find the way to reveal itself in the end.

Pentagon Course Taught Islam is the Enemy, Suggested Hiroshima-type Solution for Mecca: Report

WASHINGTON—A course for U.S. military officers has been teaching that America’s enemy is Islam in general, not just terrorists, and suggesting that the country might ultimately have to obliterate the Islamic holy cities of Mecca and Medina without regard for civilian deaths, following World War II precedents of the nuclear attack on Hiroshima or the allied firebombing of Dresden.

The Pentagon suspended the course in late April when a student objected to the material. The FBI also changed some agent training last year after discovering that it, too, was critical of Islam.

The teaching in the military course was counter to repeated assertions by U.S. officials over the past decade that the U.S. is at war against Islamic extremists, not the religion itself.

“They hate everything you stand for and will never coexist with you, unless you submit,” the instructor, Army Lt. Col. Matthew Dooley, said in a presentation last July for the course at Joint Forces Staff College in Norfolk, Virginia. The college, for professional military members, teaches midlevel officers and government civilians on subjects related to planning and executing war.

Dooley also presumed, for the purposes of his theoretical war plan, that the Geneva Conventions that set standards of armed conflict are “no longer relevant.”

He adds: “This would leave open the option once again of taking war to a civilian population wherever necessary (the historical precedents of Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki being applicable...).”

His war plan suggests possible outcomes such as “Saudi Arabia threatened with starvation ... Islam reduced to cult status” and the Muslim holy cities of Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia “destroyed.”

A copy of the presentation was obtained and posted online by Wired.com’s Danger Room blog. The college did not respond to The Associated Press’ requests for copies of the documents, but a Pentagon spokesman authenticated the documents. Dooley still works for the college, but is no longer teaching, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey said.

Dooley refused to comment to the AP, saying “Can’t talk to you, sir,” and hanging up when reached by telephone at his office Thursday.

A summary of Dooley’s military service record provided by Army Human Resources Command at Fort Knox, Kentucky, shows that he was commissioned as a second lieutenant upon graduation from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in May 1994. He has served overseas tours in Germany, Bosnia, Kuwait and Iraq. He has numerous awards including a Bronze Star Medal, the fourth-highest military award for bravery, heroism or meritorious service.

In what he termed a model for a campaign to force a transformation of Islam, Dooley called for “a direct ideological and philosophical confrontation with Islam,” with the presumption that Islam is an ideology rather than just a religion. He further asserted that Islam has already declared war on the West, and the U.S. specifically.

“It is therefore illogical” to continue with the current U.S. strategy, which Dooley said presumes there is a way of finding common ground with Islamic religious leaders without “waging near ‘total war,’“ he wrote.

The course on Islam was an elective taught since 2004 and not part of the required core curriculum. It was offered five times a year, with about 20 students each time, meaning roughly 800 students have taken the course over the years.

Though Dooley has been teaching at the college since August 2010, it was unclear when he took on that particular class, called “Perspectives on Islam and Islamic Radicalism.”

The joint staff suspended the course after it had received a student complaint, and within days Dempsey ordered all service branches to review their training to ensure other courses do not use anti-Islamic material.

On Thursday, Dempsey said the material in the Norfolk course was counter to American “appreciation for religious freedom and cultural awareness.”

“It was just totally objectionable, against our values, and it wasn’t academically sound,” Dempsey said when asked about the matter at a Pentagon news conference. “This wasn’t about ... pushing back on liberal thought; this was objectionable, academically irresponsible.”

In his July 2011 presentation on a “counterjihad,” Dooley asserted that the rise of what he called a “military Islam/Islamist resurgence” compels the United States to consider extreme measures, “unconstrained by fears of political incorrectness.”

He described his purpose as generating “dynamic discussion and thought,” while noting that his ideas and proposals are not official U.S. government policy and cannot be found in any current official Defence Department documents.

A Pentagon inquiry is seeking to determine whether someone above the professor’s level is supposed to approve course materials and whether that approval process was followed in this case, said Col. Dave Lapan, spokesman for Dempsey.

The problem of negative portrayals of Islam in federal government is not new. A six-month review the FBI launched into agent training material uncovered 876 offensive or inaccurate pages that had been used in 392 presentations, including a PowerPoint slide that said the bureau can sometimes bend or suspend the law in counter-terror investigations.

That is significant because ever since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the FBI has stressed the importance of working with leaders in the Muslim community as an important part of the battle against terror. The FBI review began last September after Wired.com reported that the FBI had discontinued a lecture in which the instructor told agent trainees in Virginia that the more devout a Muslim is, the more likely he is to be violent.

Source: http://www.thestar.com/news/world/ar...r-mecca-report

Keep being a hypocrite, US of A. Soon or later, what goes around will comes around.

Originally Posted by WickedQueen

Keep being a hypocrite, US of A. Soon or later, what goes around will comes around.

Saying the USA is a hypocrite doesn't make much sense as the USA is not a person, but a group of many people with different values and preferences.

This is certainly an alarming incident, but is it necessarily due to elements of the individuals, or perhaps a (minority culture), that has turned rotten due to lack of transparency and feedback?

The problem in the USA is not so much the people, but the fact that there are organisations that are reaching size and complexity such that they are no longer effectively controlled by the people who form them. The end result is not an organisation that fulfils the values of neither the leader, nor the body of those who comprise it.

When I was 22 I thought that would work and it would shatter the Muslim faith. However, in hindsight, I don't think it would work and if we did, every single Muslim would turn on us: Even muslims who were previously moderate would become extremists.

Keep in mind we have them inside our country as well so we'd have to turn the country into an Orwellian/Minority Report police state to be safe from them. It really goes to show that we can never kill one terrorist without creating more in their place.

I personally think that the War on Terror is a fraud, and I'm not the only one who thinks that. This whole thing is basically an excuse to justify gutting our rights under the guise of fighting a terrifying external threat.

If we were really aimed at cutting back on terrorism, do you think we'd be doing all the stuff we're doing which actually results in more terrorists created than exterminated?


R.C.
Normally I joke when I post this, but I'm really seriously asking you to read my signature down below and be sure you understand what I mean by it...

They wrote those manuals by striking out the word "communism" and replacing it with "Islam".

Also note how the article attempts to frame the conflict in the Middle East as being over religion. Whether you believe that Islam really is a threat or that it is not, you accept the assumption that the US is there because it perceives a threat to itself. And so you can either applaud the military for combating the threat at its "root" or you can chastise it for not going after the "extremists" who are the "real" threat.

The most important piece from that article:

The teaching in the military course was counter to repeated assertions by U.S. officials over the past decade that the U.S. is at war against Islamic extremists, not the religion itself.

Of course, what you're not allowed to say or think is that US involvement in the region is motivated by anything less than a strictly noble pursuit of spreading democracy.

Originally Posted by WickedQueen

Keep being a hypocrite, US of A. Soon or later, what goes around will comes around.

Vague threats will only perpetuate this nonsense. Some Pentagon people will just say "SEE? Now they are generalizing and making threats! Now we HAVE to blow them up! We have no choice!"

Gwynne Dyer had this to say (4 May 2012) about Osama bin Laden:

"I wanted you to be the first to know. It has just been revealed by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point Military Academy in the United States that I am on a very short list of journalists (eight in western countries and seven in India, Pakistan, and Arab countries) to whom Osama bin Laden wanted to send “special media material” on the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the United States. To what do I owe this honour?I can’t vouch for the authenticity of the letters that the American forces seized when they raided bin Laden’s house in northern Pakistan a year ago, but according to the CTC’s translation, the plan was to send these carefully selected and named journalists a website address and password “at the right time” so that we could download his “special material”.That never happened, because bin Laden was killed before the anniversary rolled round, but it does raise an interesting question. None of the people he named (me, Bob Fisk of the Independent in Britain, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh in the United States, and independent journalist Eric Margolis in Canada, for example) has actually written in favour of al-Qaeda and its goals—so what did he think he would gain by sending us the stuff?The answer, I suspect, is that he had been reduced to grasping at straws. He had been on the run for 10 years, and trapped in that rather bare house in Abbottabad (now bulldozed) for six. He had no real-time communication with anybody in the rest of the world because if he had used telephones, the Internet, indeed anything electronic except the TV and PlayStation, it would almost certainly have led the Americans to his lair within weeks.He tried to go on directing al-Qaeda by sending numerous letters, but they would have taken weeks to reach their destinations, and in any case by last year the organization was in an advanced state of disintegration. As an ideology and a franchise it lives on, but even in that attenuated form its ability to attract recruits and popular support has been gravely damaged by the events of the “Arab Spring”.In other words, Osama bin Laden no longer had much relevance in the world, and he had a lot of time on his hands. But he certainly went on reading his clippings. Terrorists always read their clippings.Terrorists are a recently evolved subset of the grand old category of “revolutionaries”. Their deeds, however ugly, are not “senseless”: their ultimate goal is almost always to change a government somewhere. They cannot achieve it by peaceful means, and the population whose interests they think they serve is not ready to revolt, so they resort to terrorism in an attempt to motivate and mobilize the masses.I’m using the word “terrorist” here not in its pejorative sense, but its professional one. When somebody seeks to achieve political goals by using violence and is not operating under the protection of a sovereign state, we call him a terrorist. And since the amount of violence a terrorist can bring to bear, as a non-state actor, is usually quite limited, he depends on its psychological impact more than its sheer destructiveness.The point of terrorism isn’t just to frighten people, but to stampede them (or rather their governments) into some ill-considered action that will actually benefit the terrorists’ strategy. In the post-colonial context, the violence is usually meant to make the target government behave very badly, “cracking down” in ways that will drive people—maybe its own citizens, maybe a different group entirely—into the arms of the revolutionaries.In the case of al-Qaeda, the goal of 9/11 was to terrorize and enrage the American people, but not so that they would overthrow their own government. They obviously weren’t going to do that. However, their outrage would probably make the U.S. government send massive military forces into the Arab world to “stamp out” the terrorism. That, in turn, would outrage the Arabs—who were the real object of bin Laden’s revolutionary ambitions.Well, it worked, in the sense that the West has not been so unpopular in the Arab world since the time of the Crusades. But the revolutions, when they finally started happening in Arab countries in 2010, rejected the leadership of jihadis like bin Laden and sought democracy instead. He probably died a deeply disappointed man.As a professional revolutionary, however, he would have retained his interest in the strategies and methods of terrorism down to the end. Since there was not much informed analysis of those issues available in the Arabic-language media, he would have followed it in the English-language media instead.As did all his colleagues, probably—I always assumed that al-Qaeda’s leadership was getting at least a précis of the article every time I wrote about their strategy and tactics. But for bin Laden, locked up in his house in Abbottabad, it could easily have become an obsession. I think it did, because the one thing that I and the other journalists named in his letter have in common is that we all dealt in analysis, not mere invective.Oh, and I’m pretty sure I know where he was seeing my stuff. Dawn, the leading paper in Pakistan, has run this column for the last 30 years."

Or this Wikipedia article, about Lieutenant-General (ret'd.) William G. Boykin:


Boykin achieved widespread media coverage for his statements that appeared to frame the War on Terror in religious terms, first broadcast on NBC News, October 15, 2003.^[8] William Arkin,^[9] military analyst for NBC News, was the source of the video and audiotapes of Boykin. The following day the Los Angeles Times ran a piece on Boykin. Amongst several quotes, the article revealed Boykin giving a speech about hunting down Osman Atto in Mogadishu: "He went on CNN and he laughed at us, and he said, 'They'll never get me because Allah will protect me. Allah will protect me.' Well, you know what? I knew that my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol." ^[10] Boykin later clarified this statement, saying that he was implying that Atto's true "god" was money^{[citation needed]}.



Boykin's remarks stirred much anger in the Muslim world; Arab and Muslim organizations within the US were highly critical of the comments and called for his resignation, such as James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute,^[11] and theCouncil on American-Islamic Relations.^[12] Several publications, such as Newsweek,^[13] carried articles calling for his resignation, while Senators John Kerry (D-MA) and Joe Lieberman (D-CT) were quick to denounce the remarks. Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John Warner and Democrat Carl Levin both urged Secretary of DefenseDonald Rumsfeld to launch an investigation.^[11] Rep. John Conyers (D-MD) and 26 supporters put forward H. RES. 419 "Condemning religiously intolerant remarks and calling on the President to clearly censure and reassign Lieutenant General Boykin".<sup>[14]

With people like former General Boykin in service (my personal suspicion was and is that he thought Allah was the idol), I shouldn't be too surprised that hostility to Islam as a whole should colour American military thinking. Even if it makes a bad situation worse by tarring innocent practitioners of Islam (for example, WickedQueen) with the same brush as the Salafists.

WickedQueen: Rest assured that although I practice Christianity, I have no more use for capital-F Fundamentalism than you would for Salafism.</sup>

Originally Posted by Snow Leopard

Saying the USA is a hypocrite doesn't make much sense as the USA is not a person, but a group of many people with different values and preferences.

I didn't say that to Americans nor individuals. I meant that to USA as a double-standard country, with the same concept like when Bush labeled Iran, Iraq and North Korea as "The Axis of Evil".

Originally Posted by sprinkles

Vague threats will only perpetuate this nonsense. Some Pentagon people will just say "SEE? Now they are generalizing and making threats! Now we HAVE to blow them up! We have no choice!"

It's not a threat. That's how the nature works. I would say the same thing, for instance, to my friends who cheat on their spouses. What goes around will comes around.

If I want to threaten, I would say things like: "Each of you will eventually pay for what you've done," or something like that. But I didn't say that.

But it's interesting on how you comment about what Pentagon would say ("Now we HAVE to blow them up! We have no choice!")
As like it's something that we (Muslims) must be afraid of. *chuckles*
True Muslim fear nothing but God. If the US (Pentagon) really have the intention to destroy all Muslims, you will see me in the front line, in front of your country's war tanks, bare hands, smile peacefully, welcoming death.

Originally Posted by WickedQueen

I didn't say that to Americans nor individuals. I meant that to USA as a double-standard country, with the same concept like when Bush labeled Iran, Iraq and North Korea as "The Axis of Evil".

What is a nation except an interconnection of citizens?

I'm more interested in seeing how these disconnects occur, rather than simply pointing blame (towards the government in this case).

Originally Posted by DouglasMl

Gwynne Dyer had this to say (4 May 2012) about Osama bin Laden:

...

Or this Wikipedia article, about Lieutenant-General (ret'd.) William G. Boykin:


...

<sup>With people like former General Boykin in service (my personal suspicion was and is that he thought Allah was the idol), I shouldn't be too surprised that hostility to Islam as a whole should colour American military thinking. Even if it makes a bad situation worse by tarring innocent practitioners of Islam (for example, WickedQueen) with the same brush as the Salafists.

WickedQueen: Rest assured that although I practice Christianity, I have no more use for capital-F Fundamentalism than you would for Salafism.</sup>

I don't call Salafism as fundamentalism. It's rooted from Sufism, and I admire Sufism. My favorite sufi is Rabiah al Adawiyah.

Public statements by personals who condescending Islam will surely be banned quickly because the US has an image to maintain in an international level, the image that is not practiced in their own government. The fact that Army Lt. Col. Matthew Dooley was no longer teaching, yet he wasn't fired nor jailed, shows that his case is only a tip of an iceberg. His course materials were delivered and taught for years under the Pentagon supervision. He might not be the only one who taught that. Surely there are more dirt in the closet.

Regarding the assumption from Gwynne Dyer about the intention of Osama, I can't stop shaking my head. That person doesn't seem to follow his own country's history.

I wrote below post on early 2011:

Originally Posted by WickedQueen

December 6, 2010

Nationwide, more than half of Afghans interviewed said U.S. and NATO forces should begin to leave the country in mid-2011 or earlier. More Afghans than a year ago see the United States as playing a negative role in Afghanistan, and support for President Obama's troop surge has faded.

A year ago, 61 percent of Afghans supported the deployment of 30,000 additional U.S. troops. In the new poll, 49 percent support the move, with 49 percent opposed.

"We want the Afghan forces to be able to control security so the foreign forces can leave," said Mohamed Neim Nurzai, 40, a farmer from Farah province who participated in the poll.

After a big drop last year, more than a quarter of Afghans again say attacks against U.S. and other foreign military forces are justifiable.

Overall, nearly three-quarters of Afghans now believe their government should pursue negotiations with the Taliban, with almost two-thirds willing to accept a deal allowing Taliban leaders to hold political office. Nearly a third of adults see the Taliban as more moderate today than they were when they ruled the country.

Source: Afghan poll shows falling confidence in U.S. efforts to secure country « RAWA News

Political repression is so bad in various parts of the Muslim world, that they have become factories for rebellion, which is usually called “terrorism” in the U.S. For example, in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, where political repression is pervasive, the only way people can articulate their frustration and anger is through religion. And that’s where fundamentalism emerges.

The regimes U.S. support in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt invite fundamentalism because they leave no room for rational political discourse, for voicing one’s opinion through elections, for working within the system to remove people from power. Citizens come to see violence as the only option.

The problem with the “war on terror” is that it fails to identify the causes of terror. We don’t need a war; we need a global dialogue to stop the engine of terror. One thing that George W. Bush is right about: he says people need freedom. Unfortunately, he’s either incapable of seeing, or unwilling to see, the oppression caused by the tyrants with whom he has allied himself.

Musharraf, Qaddafi, the Saudi royal family, the leader of Uzbekistan, the head of Tunisia, the head of Algeria — Bush is in bed with all of them while claiming to fight terror. Not only do they support the U.S. “war on terror”, they actually use it to their advantage.

Take Egypt as an example. For years, only the ruling party in Egypt could field candidates for the presidency. One could not create an opposition political party without permission from the ruling party, and of course it wouldn’t grant permission to any viable competitor.

There is a party in Egypt called the al-Wasat Party — literally, the “Moderate Party” — that has been applying for the last ten years to become a legitimate party. Over and over again, it has been denied. So, lacking other options, this party engages in illegal underground political organization. Now Egypt is claiming that the al-Wasat Party and other underground political parties are terrorists.

Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak tells Bush that it’s in America’s interest that he, Mubarak, stay in power, because otherwise the terrorists will come to power. All these totalitarian rulers have to do is say the T-word, and U.S. politicians get shivers up and down their spine.

Most people in the Middle East believe that the U.S. supports Israel in order to keep Arabs fighting and to destabilize the region. This instability justifies a Western military presence there, thus facilitating Western access to the region’s oil resources.

There’s also a belief among most progressives in the Middle East that the tyrannical regimes there consolidate their power by playing the Israel card. The tyrants claim they have to maintain a heavily armed police state because Israel is around the corner. That’s how Iraq, Syria, and Jordan all justify their oppressive states. In that sense, the presence of Israel is actually a gift to the Middle East’s tyrannical regimes.

Now, no one can dispute that Saddam Hussein was a loathsome and offensive man. But Saddam Hussein, too, was a “Made in America” product. When Saddam came to power, the U.S. gave him a long list of Iraqi communists to “eliminate”. He got rid of a number of them and slowly ingratiated himself with Western powers, especially the U.S.

Later, through go-betweens Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, the U.S. supported Saddam in Iraq’s war against Iran. The U.S. actually aided and abetted Saddam’s killing of thousands of Kurds. The chemical weapons he used against both Iranians and Iraqi Kurds were made in Virginia.

By helping put Saddam in power, U.S. created the situation that supposedly necessitated the war in Iraq. Meanwhile, there is no way to switch off a tyrant like Saddam, and he eventually began to cause trouble where U.S. didn’t want him to.

So to claim that U.S. had nothing to do with his tyranny is ludicrous. On the contrary, U.S. knew everything he was doing, but as long as it was in what the U.S. considered their interest to let him do it, they looked the other way.

During the Cold War, U.S. allies with the Middle East’s tyrannical regimes, such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Together with United Kingdom, they support the Mujahideen (which later on grew as Taliban) against the Soviet during the Soviet War in Afghanistan. The US intelligence services began to provide financial aid six months before the Soviet deployment.

On July 3, 1979, US President Jimmy Carter signed an executive order authorizing the CIA to conduct covert propaganda operations against the communist regime. The US viewed the conflict in Afghanistan as an integral Cold War struggle, and the CIA provided assistance to anti-Soviet forces through the Pakistani intelligence services, in a program called Operation Cyclone.

A similar movement occurred in other Muslim countries, bringing contingents of so-called Afghan Arabs, foreign fighters who wished to wage jihad against the atheist communists. Notable among them was a young Saudi named Osama bin Laden, whose Arab group eventually evolved into al-Qaeda.

Once the Soviets withdrew, the US decided not to help with reconstruction of Afghanistan and instead they handed over the interests of the country to US allies, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Neglected by the U.S., Pakistan quickly took advantage of this opportunity and forged relations with warlords to secure trade interests and routes.

In late 1994, a group of well-trained called Taliban was chosen by Pakistan to protect a convoy trying to open a trade route from Pakistan to Central Asia. They proved an able force, fighting off rival Mujahideen and warlords. The Taliban then went on to take the city of Kandahar, beginning a surprising advance that ended with their capture of Kabul in September 1996.

If only U.S. took responsibility for the damage they did to Afghanistan after the withdrawal of Soviets, Pakistan won’t have the opportunity to forged relations with warlords and Taliban won’t have the opportunity to rule Afghanistan.

In September 2001, the U.S. placed significant pressure on the Taliban to turn over bin Laden and al-Qaeda in response to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. On October 7, the U.S. began bombing Taliban military sites and aiding the Northern Alliance. By November 21, the Taliban had lost Kabul and by December 9 had been completely routed.

The Bush administration helped install Karzai as president after the fall of the Taliban. He has run a government so ineffective and so corrupt that his country ranks 179th on Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index, just ahead of last-place Somalia, which has no government at all.

December 3, 2010

The United States and its allies have spent more than $27 billion to recruit and train Afghan security personnel since 2002—roughly half of all the money earmarked for rebuilding the nation after decades of conflict—and they plan to spend about $20 billion more on the effort.

But the Afghan forces have yet to develop into reliable allies. High rates of corruption and absenteeism are casting a pall over the Afghan army and police. NATO officials say that fewer than one in five new Afghan soldiers or police officers can read, and the State Department reported earlier this year that about 41 percent of the police recruits in regional training centers had tested positive for illicit drugs.

The continued battlefield failings of the Afghan troops are giving U.S. soldiers in Mushan a newfound sense of respect for the Taliban, a disciplined and tactically proficient force that fights relentlessly. “Maybe this country needs the Taliban,” Staff Sgt. Brandon Cole said one afternoon, shaking his head. “They’re much, much better than the [Afghan national army].”

Source: NationalJournal.com - Afghanistan?s Other Battle - Friday, December 3, 2010

It is the U.S themselves who planted the seed of terrorism. By acting like a hero who tries to save Iraq and Afghanistan people, what they do now in those countries is actually no more than trying to cover up their own sins. In order to save their ass, they also don’t care how many people who have been killed in the war.

Add that with this fact:

At least 919,967 people have been killed in Afghanistan and Iraq since the U.S. and coalition attacks.
That number is about 303 times as many people who have been killed in the ghastly attacks of 9/11 and about more than 130 times as many people who have been killed in all terrorist attacks in the world from 1993-2004, according to data compiled by the U.S. State Department.

Source: Unknown*News | Helen & Harry's cranky weblog of news and opinion | unknownnews@inbox.com

U.S. morals, therefore, is far worse than the terrorist itself.

Originally Posted by Snow Leopard

I'm more interested in seeing how these disconnects occur

Well that is your homework as a citizen, isn't it? Good luck with that.

Originally Posted by Snow Leopard

rather than simply pointing blame (towards the government in this case).

Don't forget to tell that to Bush and the Pentagon as well.