The action is in the reaction: the terrorist leaders and their sponsors are providing the pretext for the U.S. government to institute police-state measures. (Terrorism).

[T]he battle has moved to inside America.... I tell you, freedom and human rights in America are doomed. The U.S. Government will lead the American people -- and the West in general -- into an unbearable hell and a choking life.

-- Osama bin Laden 

BBC taped video interview after 9-11

In his videotape message cited above, recorded several weeks after the September 11th attacks, Osama bin Laden was obviously pleased over the expectation that the terrorist acts would provoke the U.S. government to implement repressive measures. He was hopeful that the repression would progress to full-blown totalitarianism, making America "an unbearable hell."

Bin Laden's remarks are extremely revealing; they are a textbook restatement of the Marxist-Leninist doctrine spouted by terrorists worldwide for the past several decades.

They sound as if they came right out of the Mini-Manual for Urban Guerrillas, authored by Brazilian Communist Carlos Marighella in 1969. Translated into many languages and used as a standard handbook for terrorists worldwide, it teaches that the urban guerrilla "must use revolutionary violence" to wreak havoc on the public order. Marighella continues:

Then, the government has no alternative except to intensify repression. The police roundups, house searches, arrests of innocent people make life in the city unbearable....

Rejecting the "so-called political solution," the urban guerrilla must become more aggressive and violent, resorting without letup to sabotage, terrorism, expropriations, assaults, kidnappings, and executions, heightening the disastrous situation in which the government must act....

In other words, a key element of the terrorist plan is to provoke the government to implement oppressive police-state measures, to destroy constitutional restrictions on government power. Note that in this scheme it is government that primarily benefits from terrorism. It is the people who lose, as they are entrapped between the violence of terrorists (pressure from below) and the expanded powers of government (pressure from above).

Origins of Terror

Uruguay's Communist Tupamaros were the first terrorist group to put Marighella's formula to work, with amazing success. Their terror spree of 1970-72 pushed Uruguay into a military dictatorship before the end of 1972. The Tupamaros became the model for the Weather Underground in the U.S., the Red Army Fraction in Germany, the Red Brigades in Italy, and terrorist groups throughout Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, and Europe.

One of the major promoters of the Marighella-Tupamaro thesis was millionaire Italian Communist Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, a close friend of Fidel Castro, the PLO, and the Soviet bloc countries. Heir to an immense fortune, Feltrinelli bankrolled and organized much of Europe's terrorist underground. He also published Marighella's Mini-Manual. Feltrinelli exhorted his revolutionary comrades to engage in "intensive provocation," to "violate the law openly ... challenging and outraging institutions and public order in every way." This meant even random killing of innocent victims, such as "striking indiscriminately at passengers on a train, etc." These actions would open "an advanced phase of the struggle" by provoking "an authoritarian turn to the right" -- which, in the Marxist dialectic refers to the inflicting of harsh police-state measures on the people by the government. Feltrinelli's terrorist cadres nearly pushed the Italian government to adopt totalitarian measures like Uruguay's.

In a slight variation on Feltrinelli's instructions, the terrorist hijackers of September 11th were "striking indiscriminately at passengers" on a plane, rather than a train. The purpose was the same: Provoke America's destruction from within by causing the government to overreact. Seen in this light, the 9-11 attacks are not at all "senseless," as so many commentators have described them. Vicious, yes. Evil, yes. But they make perfect, murderous sense to the terrorists who committed them, and the masterminds who set them in motion.

The Marighella-Feltrinelli "intensive provocation" strategy is rooted in an even older revolutionary legacy. The shocking images of hijacked jetliners slamming into the World Trade Center exemplify what terrorists refer to as "propaganda by deed" or "the propaganda of the deed." Credited with coining the term, Italian anarchist-socialist Errico Malatesta declared in 1876 that his Italian federation "believes that the insurrectional fact, destined to affirm socialist principles by deed, is the most efficacious means of propaganda." Meaning very simply that a single violent act accomplishes far more than speeches, pamphlets, and peaceful demonstrations. Following this cold-blooded logic, the anarchists launched a stunning succession of bombings and assassinations across Europe.

The 9-11 terrorists used the modern technology of commercial aviation and the mass media's global reach to carry "propaganda by deed" to a fiendish new level. Their murderous acts have achieved maximum propaganda impact; the riveting video images of the 9-11 deeds have been played and replayed many thousands of times, reaching a repeat audience numbering in the billions.

The Black Tuesday hijackers were following in the bloody footsteps of Vladimir I. Lenin, the prophet of modern terrorism who launched propaganda by deed on an apocalyptic scale. In 1918, as the first dictator of the Soviet Union, Lenin introduced the concept of "mass terror" as formal communist strategy. Inspired by the ferocity of the French Revolution's Reign of Terror, he declared: "we can achieve nothing unless we use terror." He further advised: "The energy and mass nature of the terror must be encouraged." To carry out his demonic vision he organized the Cheka (predecessor to the KGB and the current Russian FSB) under the leadership of Feliks Dzerzhinsky. "We stand for organized terror," Dzerzhinsky proudly declared.

Cheka official Martyn Latsis explained in the December 25, 1918 issue of Pravda that "during investigations one need not look for evidence or proof of what the accused said or did against Soviet authority. The first question you must put to him is this: What are his origins and upbringing, his education and occupation? These issues must determine the fate of the accused. This is the meaning and essence of Red Terror."

The Red Terror launched by Lenin and sustained by Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot, and other Communist dictators had, by 1986, bathed our planet in the blood of more than 120 million victims, according to the research of Professor R. J. Rummel. In the 1960s, the Moscow strategists launched a new vehicle for terror: a global network of seemingly independent organizations carrying out a worldwide campaign of terror. Germany's Red Army Fraction, Italy's Red Brigades, the Japanese Red Army, the Palestine Liberation Organization, the Sandinista National Liberation Front, and dozens of other groups from every part of the Free World received training, arms, explosives, and other critical assistance from Russia, China, Cuba, and the Soviet bloc countries. Terrorist training camps were established in Russia, North Korea, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, East Germany, Cuba, Syria, Libya, Iraq, and elsewhere. The era of terror was spawned.

Although the 9-11 hijackers have been universally referred to as "Islamic fundamentalists," they quite obviously are following the Communist program. There is another very important piece of evidence in this regard that the media, government officials, and so-called experts have almost totally ignored. According to the description provided by Jeremy Glick, one of the citizen heroes of Flight 93 believed to have taken on the terrorists, the 9-11 hijackers may have been members of the Islamic Jihad, backed by Syria, Iran, and Russia. Mr. Glick managed to call his wife from the plane and told her it had been commandeered by "three Arab-looking men with red headbands." Red headbands? That is a trademark of Islamic Jihad. Like many of the so-called "Muslim extremist" groups, they are more "red" (Marxist-Leninist) than "green" (Islamic fundamentalist).

The federal government itself has provided additional reason to believe that Islamic Jihad terrorists were involved in the attacks. According to documents introduced by federal prosecutors in the 1998 Kenya and Tanzania embassy bombing cases, the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda effectively merged several years ago.

Along these same lines, it is important to note that bin Laden and members of his al-Qaeda and Islamic Jihad have joined the hardcore Communist atheists such as George Habash, Abu Nidal, and Ahmed Jabril at global terror summits in Tehran, Damascus, and Khartoum. Even more telling is evidence produced by the Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare indicating that bin Laden is one of the three members of the Committee of Three overseeing HizbAllah International, the global collaborative terror apparatus launched at the 1996 Tehran terror summit.

But although bin Laden is a well known player in the terror network, he is not the chief player, and the network of which he is a part is not rooted in Islamic fundamentalism. Sitting in ultimate authority over the Committee of Three is Dr. Mahdi Chamran Savehi, Iran's chief of External Intelligence and supervisor of its global terror operations. Mahdi Chamran and his brother Mustafa were both educated in the United States. Active in radical-left politics in the 1960s in California, they established a Marxist front known as the Muslim Students' Association of America and an Iranian terrorist organization called Red Shiism. The Chamran brothers, like many other Marxist-Leninists, adopted the rhetoric and symbols of Islam to spread the Communist message to a larger, unsuspecting audience, in the same way that Marxist-Leninists in Europe and the Americas co-opted the symbols and language of Christianity to promote Communism as "liberation theology" among Christians. Mahdi Chamran continues to work closely with R ussian intelligence, as he did during the Soviet era.

Terrorism: A State Enterprise

What is most important to keep in mind from the foregoing is that the terrorist threat facing us now is undeniably a continuation of the global Soviet terror network of earlier decades. The U.S. government and other Western governments are 1-unning from an inconvenient truth: Their new "ally" in the war on terror, Russia, is now, as was the Soviet Union previously, the principal sponsor of terrorism in the world. They focus on the relatively minor tentacles like bin Laden's al-Qaeda while ignoring the head of the terror octopus.

What emerged from the mountains of evidence concerning the terror decades of the 1960s, '70s, and '80s is this critical understanding: The modem phenomenon of international terrorism was only possible on the scale at which it was occurring because of state sponsorship. Without support provided by the Communist bloc nations the motley international terrorist bands would pose no major threat.

The U.S. Senate's Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism, in a 1985 report entitled State-Sponsored Terrorism, observed: "The prevailing tendency has been to view each terrorist act as an individual incident without political pattern or strategic dimension. This attitude is naive in view of the accumulating evidence of collusion among states sponsoring violence against pluralist democracies, particularly the United States and its allies."

And the Soviet Union was undoubtedly the principal sponsoring state. As Dr. Hans Josef Horchem, head of West Germany's anti-terrorist Office for the Defense of the Constitution, noted in 1979: "The KGB is engineering international terrorism. The facts can be proven, documented, and are well a known to the international Western intelligence community."

In 1964, the Soviet Politburo decided to increase spending on its fledgling terrorist networks by one thousand percent. The year 1967 marked another leap forward. "Shortly after Yuri Andropov became head of state security in May 1967," notes the aforementioned Senate report, "Moscow adopted a policy of supplying training, arms, and ammunition in generous quantity to Syria and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) under Yasser Arafat. The PLO, with this kind of encouragement and support, has reached out in all directions against U.S. 'imperialist forces.'"

Many of the graduates of the Soviet terror camps of the 1960s, '70s, and '80s -- from the PLO, PFLP, IRA, etc. -- are presently training and guiding the terrorist groups currently making the headlines. The newer actors on the block -- al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, Hamas, Abu Sayyaf -- depend on the same state sponsors who supported and sheltered the earlier cadres: Syria, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Cuba -- and, ultimately, Russia and China.

In a news conference on October 11, 2001, Bush characterized the new global conflict as "a war against all those who seek to export terror, and a war against those governments that support or shelter them." (Emphasis added). He hit this theme again in his address before the United Nations General Assembly on September 12, 2002, stating: "And our greatest fear is that terrorists will find a shortcut to their mad ambitions when an outlaw regime supplies them with the technologies to kill on a massive scale."

The problem is that all of the most culpable "outlaw regimes" were represented right there in the UN General Assembly -- and the president has partnered us with some of them in the war on terror. In his UN speech, President Bush repeatedly singled out Iraq's role in international terror and warned of Saddam Hussein's plans for developing "weapons of mass destruction" (WMD). The fact is, however, that it is our new "partner" Vladimir Putin who is supplying Iraq with the WMD technology, which is a continuation of the Moscow-Baghdad relationship extending back four decades. Putin has recently concluded a $40 billion agreement with Saddam Hussein. Russian military advisers and scientists have always figured prominently in Saddam's totalitarian state, and have been especially critical for his WMD programs.

Our Anti-terror Posse

Near the start of his January 2002 State of the Union Address, President Bush motioned toward the tall, bearded man seated in a place of honor next to Mrs. Bush. "And this evening," said the president, "we welcome the distinguished interim leader of a liberated Afghanistan: Chairman Hamid Karzai." But Mr. Karzai, whom the Bush administration installed in power, was, and is, closely allied to Iran, a member of the Bush-designated "axis of evil." Iran's state-run Tehran Times reported on January 3, 2002 that Karzai had met the previous day with Iranian minister Mohsen Aminzadeh and had said: "We want to see our Iranian brothers involved in every aspect of the reconstruction of Afghanistan." That has happened; the Northern Alliance terrorists who have come into the government with Karzai have close ties to Iran and Russia. On February 24th, Karzai journeyed to Tehran to meet with "reform" terror chief Mohammad Khatami. "Our presence here is like going to your brother's house, because Iran is our brother country, " Karzai said.

Meanwhile, Russia is busy in Iran expanding the $800 million nuclear facility it has been constructing for that terror regime in the city of Bushehr. In July, Russia released information about its new 10-year program to expand scientific and military cooperation with Iran. That program includes plans to build as many as five more nuclear power reactors. It also undoubtedly includes plans to enhance weapons programs such as Iran's ballistic missile program, which Russia built in violation of an international convention it had signed known as the Missile Technology Control Regime. Russia's enormous assistance has enabled the Tehran regime to continue as the main sponsor of the ultra-violent Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad, which have set up shop well beyond the confines of the Middle East in Asia, Africa, Europe, Latin America, and the United States.

Note that in 1984 Iran's current president, Mohammad Khatami, presided over a secret meeting in Tehran to create an international terror brigade that would be provided with vast economic and technological resources. The U.S. Senate's report, State Sponsored Terrorism, provides an English translation of the "TOP SECRET" minutes of that meeting. It leaves no doubt that Khatami, whom our media continue to falsely portray as a "moderate" and a "reformer," was building a truly formidable terror apparatus. And the world has witnessed its handiwork for the past decade and a half.

Like Iraq and Libya, Syria is a Marxist, tyrannical regime that has adopted an Islamic veneer in recent years. And, like Iraq, Libya, and Iran, it has a vigorous WMD program -- being constructed with the assistance of Russia, China, and North Korea. It was Syrian-backed Hezbollah terrorists who carried out the suicide truck bombings of the U.S. Embassy, U.S. Marine barracks, and U.S. Embassy annex in Beirut during the 1980s, killing hundreds of Americans. In 1982, Syrian dictator Hafez al-Assad brutally slaughtered 20,000 of his own people in the city of Hama. During the same period, his troops and terrorists murdered thousands of Lebanese and turned the previously beautiful and prosperous Lebanon into rubble.

Terrorist organizations with actual bases of operation inside Syria or Syrian-occupied Lebanon include Islamic Jihad, Hamas, Hezbollah, and many others. Besides directly and indirectly supporting these groups, Syria has used its own intelligence organizations to carry out terrorist bombings and assassinations. Yet the Bush administration now regards Syria as an ally against terror.

President Bush's speeches and policies on terrorism are self-contradictory, schizophrenic, and dangerous. They have made us partners with the world's worst terrorists, ostensibly to fight terrorism. And in his rush to establish a Homeland Security Department, he would demolish our system of checks and balances, sweep away our constitutional separation of powers, and create an enormous police-state apparatus. What can Mr. Bush have in mind with this misbegotten and dangerous crusade? Former Senator Gary Hart offers a clue.

Commenting on the Black Tuesday attacks during a September 14, 2001 meeting of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), Hart stated: "There is a chance for the President of the United States to use this disaster to carry out what his father -- a phrase his father used I think only once, and it hasn't been used since -- and that is a new world order." The global power elite attending the CFR program knew what the senator meant and, doubtless, heartily agreed with him. According to former CER member Admiral Chester Ward, the CFR goal of a "new world order" entails "submergence of U.S. sovereignty and national independence into an all-powerful one-world government" under the UN. Hundreds of internationalists from the CFR permeate President Bush's cabinet and entire administration. And as another article in this special issue shows (see page 19), plans for a global war on terrorism and a massive Homeland Security Department were scripted in CFR position papers long before the hijacked planes of 9-11 slammed into t he World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the Pennsylvania countryside. Yes, America must fight terrorism with resolute action and unyielding determination, but the Bush-CFR plan ultimately would extinguish the very liberty it purports to defend. That is something the terrorists themselves could never directly succeed in doing.