 
Reign of Terror
 Criminal warlords along the tribal belt of Pakistan is giving material support and protection to what remains of al-Qaeda.
 Hidden in the harsh reality of Pakistan’s Northwest Province Territory (NPT) near the Afghan border, where border security is nonexistent, al-Qaeda's goals remain murky with no specific plan to continue the “war” of erasing the American presence in the Middle East by coercion while imposing its vision of Islam on the world. There is no evidence of a coherent strategy, or capability of regrouping after September 11, 2001—yet Osama bin Laden, his lieutenant, Ayman Zawahiri remain at the top of the list of terrorist threats against the United States with “the central front in the war on terror” situated precariously along Pakistan's western frontier.
Despite the fact that Zawahiri “claimed” responsibility for the July 2005 London bombings, and investigators “believe” the failed plot to blow up airliners from London bears some relationship to estimable al-Qaeda, “warnings” about the organization’s intensions come exclusively from “officials” rather than the terrorist leadership, confirming no more than what they have long held.
But where exactly is the terrorist threat? If torture hasn’t provided the answer after eight years, then where is the answer? Bin Laden "inspiring" others is not the same as his vaunted al-Qaeda having a specific plan or a discernible strategy for the goals that bin Laden hopes to achieve.
 As the United States and its petit corps of allies battle sundry bands of militants and violent criminals—Taliban warlords, Pakistani criminals, and Iraqi religious sects—where exactly in the world is al-Qaeda?
On September 17, 2001 CNN reported: Osama bin Laden is the “prime suspect” in last Tuesday's terrorist attacks in New York and Washington and the United States wants to capture him, President Bush said Monday. Speaking with reporters after a Pentagon briefing on plans to call up reserve troops, Bush offered some of his most blunt language to date when he was asked if he wanted bin Laden dead. “I want justice," Bush said. "And there's an old poster out West… I recall, that said, ‘Wanted, Dead or Alive’.”
By 2006, President Bush sardonically incanted, “This thing about . . . let's put 100,000 of our special forces stomping through Pakistan in order to find bin Laden is just simply not the strategy that will work.” Bush, by this time, regarded bin Laden as "not a top priority use of American resources.” Perhaps the president knew then what the American people are beginning to suspect now.
In 2006, the most likely scenario would be that al-Qaeda would pick targets that would simultaneously create fear and damage the United States economy. While Osama bin Laden had given no real clues about where or when he might strike the U.S. economy, President Bush said, “I truly am not that concerned about him.”
 Like a movie with multiple story lines and vast thematic scope, the story of the United States after the September attack in 2008 is as much about the banking business as about the consequences of economic terrorism.
Osama bin Laden missed his chance. Those gray men in blue suits on Wall Street raised a “false flag” and ushered in fiscal anarchy to reign supreme.
Terrorism more sharply here defined, though with flexible political perspectives, presents an ambiguity that piggybacks the United States in its “War on Terror” further ofiscated by a former U.S. vice-president who prefers to debate history rather than learn from it.
 Dick Cheney is quoted as saying: “When we get people who are more concerned about reading the rights to an al-Qaeda terrorist than they are with protecting the United States against people who are absolutely committed to do anything they can to kill Americans then I worry. These are evil people. And we’re not going to win this fight by turning the other cheek.
 “The United States needs to be not so much loved as it needs to be respected. Sometimes that requires us to take actions that generate controversy.” Cheney worries. “I’m not at all sure that that’s what the Obama administration believes.”
On 9 December 2008, President Bush urged President-elect Barack Obama to “stay on the defensive” against al-Qaeda and other terrorists, saying his own administration had laid a “solid foundation” to meet the emerging threats around the world.
Maybe what President Bush and Vice-President Cheney fail to consider is that terrorism is a means to an end; and that Osama bin Laden in using this technique is actually an “anarchist” operating without desire for financial gain, sexual gratification or social status. Bin Laden watches a building burn just to watch it burn—not for profit, but out of some redoubtable hate. Is this terror? Yes. Is it terrorism? Yes, absolutely. Are the perpetrators terrorists? Of course, but to what end? Whatever the answer assumes the threat represents some long-range, coherent strategy.
But what's the plan?
Days after September 11, 2001, Osama bin Laden praised the attacks on the United States while denying involvement. Nevertheless, bin Laden and his lieutenant, Ayman Zawahiri had become the focus of the War on Terror, even though this lens failed taking into view that these two men are only weakly linked to small groups of disillusioned young Arabs, mostly Muslims; militants attracted to the al-Qaeda "strategy". Collectively lacking significant numbers, these individual cliques plan their own operations, looking to bin Laden not to command but to fund their activities.
 Osama bin Laden (born 10 March 1957) is Saudi with a powerful sense of tightly controlled hierarchy. To inflict casualties upon United States assets by forging operational connections with foreign killers in the Middle East (North Africa and Europe) or with like-minded individuals might seem more tactical than strategic ...but maybe not. Nonetheless, where’s the al-Qaeda terrorist infrastructure to replace the one decimated in Afghanistan years ago? Aside from bin Laden and his deputy, al-Zawahiri, what’s left—volunteers?
Whatever remains of bin Laden’s benighted organization after the fall of the Taliban in October 2001 is darkly hidden in Pakistan’s outlaw tribal belt of steep mountains and loudly falling rocks, where ingloriously it huddles in this small corner of the world. So it should not come as any surprise that outside of a few dated videotapes, the presumptive leader has “disappeared” beyond capture.
Is this Osama bin Laden’s plan?
There is no evidence that bin Laden used the term “al-Qaeda” in naming his “group” until after September 11th, when the Americans so anointed his organization with reason to doubt that al-Qaeda is "widespread" ( as the term and criterion is understood). All this notwithstanding, to defeat such a shadowy bad guy and his dark conspiracy against the U.S. is to defeat his plan. 
But does al-Qaeda really have a plan, or is Osama bin Laden in reality The Joker? An honest assessment is that there can be no “solid foundation” against anarchists who use a state of terror in perpetrating their crimes of passion, well-illustrated in the motion picture THE DARK KNIGHT (2008) written by Christopher and Jonathan Nolan. The Joker speaking autobiographically to the severely hospitalized district attorney, Harvey Dent:
 “Do I really look like a guy with a plan? You know what I am? I’m a dog chasing cars. I wouldn’t know what to do with one if I caught it! You know…I just do…things. The mob has got a plan, the cops has plans, Gordon’s got plans. You know, they’re schemers…trying to control their little worlds. I’m not a schemer. I try to show the schemers how pathetic their attempts to try to control things really are. So, when I say…you and your girlfriend wasn’t personal, you’ll know that I’m telling the truth. It’s the schemers that put you where you are. You were a schemer; you had plans and, dah, look where that got cha? I just think that what I do best is…I took your little plan and I turned it on its side…. Look what I did to this city with a few drums of gas and a couple of bullets. Hmm? You know, you know what I notice? Nobody panics when things go according to plan, even if the plan is horrifying. If tomorrow I tell the press that, like, a gangbanger will get shot, or a truck-load of soldiers will be blown up, no one panics because that’s all part of the plan. But when I say, “The mayor tomorrow will die….”
Specific fear that some evil event or action is going to occasion a visit from the self-involved “all-powerful” man almighty—like The Joker—whose presumed god-like control over life and death in a somewhat indiscriminate manner is propaganda designed to inspire fear in the American people; but has, instead, upended the Constitution of the United States, bleeding the treasury of the federal government while plunging the country by the minute deeper into debt.
Maybe what President Bush and Vice-President Cheney fail to understand is what The Joker makes abundantly clear—the distinction between “terror” and “anarchy” in this ongoing geo-political, nebulous war with al-Qaeda.
August 7, 1998 the bombing of two U.S. embassies in East Africa resulted in upwards of 300 deaths, mostly local black residents. Since casualties matter more when American lives are involved, the U.S. news media had decided the story—unlike those other horrors in Africa—was newsworthy. And the U.S. Department of Justice (as a matter of law) needing to show that bin Laden was the leader of a criminal organization, charged him in absentia under the Racketeer Influence and Corrupt Organizations Act, also known as the RICO the statutes.
Since 2001, Osama bin Laden has been the “poster boy” and principal “boogieman” for the United States in its hugely ambiguous and extremely costly War on Terror. Bin Laden is a prodigally wayward son of the prominent Saudi bin Laden family, where blood is thicker than mud. Now, eight years on, he’s a man best known for hiding out in the wilderness of Afghanistan—maybe.
Over two decades, bin Laden having lost his moral compass amounted to a criminal enterprise, distracting the U.S. military and its allies into fighting proxy wars with insurgent Iraqi religious sects and the resurgent drug-dealing Taliban. Bin Laden’s outfit essentially indistinguishable from the pirates of Somalia and the drug cartels of Mexico finds itself among numerous others infesting the underbelly of Southeast Asia and the continent of Africa.
 Relying upon a functioning anarchistic system, Osama bin Laden’s following can only thrive in a failed-state. At some point, his gang has become less an organization and more an American invention. Some worrying news, should anyone today choose to conquer an area of the world ungoverned, unstable and unlawful in order to create an independent state of their own—as the Europeans did beginning in the 17th Century, displacing the native tribes of North America; and Jewish settlers in Palestine where the last gasp of the British Empire in 1948 held suzerain over its Arab population. There are still a number of failed-states, or territories therein, ripe for the picking and takeover. Any number of criminal gangs, radical religious riff-raff, or rabid-political organizations might select a nebulous area of the world to set up shop in an anarchistic settlement, wherefrom they might launch their activities with virtual immunity.
 The Northwest Province Territory (NPT) of Pakistan, criminal cabals populate the tribal belt, operating outside the law and reach of the Pakistani government and its all-volunteer army; the northeastern frontier of Somalia, rag-tag, loosely federated pirates maintain their bases to carry out randomly seized commercial shipping vessels off the Horn of Africa; and (at present) four contiguous states of northern Mexico share the border with southwestern United States and serve as the feeding ground for drug cartels and violent criminals engaged in illegal cross-border trade.
And about those home-grown terrorists born and raised inside the U.S. border...
 Theodore Kacynski is an American mathematician
also known as "The Unabomber", a domestic terrorist who carried out a campaign of mail bombings across the United States. An intellectual child prodigy, Kaczynski received an undergraduate degree from Harvard University and earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Michigan. At age 25 he started a "bombing campaign" from 1978 to 1995, sending 16 bombs to targets including universities and airlines, killing three people and injuring 23, promising to desist from "terrorism" if the New York Times or the Washington Post published his manifesto.
The Unabomber was the target of the most expensive investigations in the history of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Once arrested, to avoid the death penalty, Kaczynski pled guilty and was sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole.
Timothy McVeigh convicted of bombing
the federal building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995 hoped to inspire a revolt against " the tyrannical federal government" of the United States. The bombing killed 168 people, the deadliest act of terrorism within the United States prior to the September 11, 2001 attack on the country. Sentenced to death, he was executed on June 11, 2001—three months later the United States would declare the "War on Terror" with Arab men profiled and targeted as "terrorists" with the term becoming increasingly philosophical, the language simple and codified, being funny in that way.
Eric Robert Rudolph, the Olympic Park Bomber
is described by the FBI as a terrorist who committed a series of bombings across the southern United States . Spending years on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list until his 2003 capture, Rudolph pled guilty and accepted five consecutive life sentences in order to avoid a trial and the death penalty.
Rudolph, connected to a "white supremacy" movement, murdered two people and left 150 injured.
Are white males in America never targeted as a threat against the interest of the Untied States? Is profiling terror-suspects bias-based? Executing murderers like Timothy McVeigh, as opposed to incarcerating them for life, might reduce high levels of predatory violence by a few percentage points, but there can be no debate on the massive effect of having a criminal justice system as an antidote for anarchy. But whether or not the hands of the murder are white or brown, to be sure, these men wilfully stole the lives of the innocent, merely affirming Shakespeare: "What's past is prologue."
 The storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789 signaled the French Revolution, a mad period of blood-red brutal violence with members of the ruling families killed. The anarchy that fueled this reign of terror was ushered in by radical egalitarians, targeting both aristocrats and their fellow revolutionaries who were deemed too moderate.
All were sent to the guillotine!
The rising tide of anger in the Islamic world is directed toward the various franchises who say in the name of “Allah” they represent al-Qaeda in going about the wholesale slaughter of women, the elderly, and especially children. The outrage of religious scholars and militants alike express alarm over the murdering of Muslims—particularly in Muslim countries.
The point here being that in the total absence of law and respect for human life, and with nothing to keep the social order in tact, pockets of criminal communities in the United States and throughout the world lack the center of gravity and moral compass to hold a cultural nucleus together; authoritarian societies ruled by feudal overlords of corruption whose only goal is nihilism, providing no limits to self-indulgence and a constant market for the global arms industry.
 LORD OF WAR (2005) so far the best movie about the sordid business of the global arms industry, assumes the genre of political crime thriller written and directed by Andrew Niccol and starring Nicolas Cage, concerned with an illegal arms dealer that highlights the trafficking of weapons in aiding and abetting activities largely carried out by the dominant criminal elements inside the failed-states of Africa, Asia and the Middle East.
The movie cautiously suggests that the "War on Terror" may never be over...because when the industry is warfare, “peace” is never good for business.
Just as arms dealers depend upon anarchy to profit, historically the lack of control in an aggressive, chaotic environment benefited those who profited mightily from terrorizing an entire population inside the United States. Anarchists, of course, will argue that their system functions upon the spontaneous freedom of individuals in autonomous communities, operating on principles of mutual and voluntary association—not unlike the Ku Klux Klan.
 THE BIRTH OF A NATION, also known as The Clansman (1915) directed by D.W. Griffith—the seminal (silent) feature-length motion picture—is the earliest example of nationwide systemic racism in America, and symptom of a broader climate of injustice throughout the country during those paternal decades of the 20th Century. Nearly a century-old, this odd species of proto-cinema and histrionic portrayal is noteworthy for the “heroism” shown the Ku Klux Klan following the American Civil War, and for becoming the first bona fide Hollywood blockbuster.
The racial terrorism seen in the sinister rise of the Ku Klux Klan retains the movie’s dubious status as provocateur and purveyor of that cultural disease, remitted but not cured among the U.S. population, as witnessed in the election of President Barack Obama. The disease having resisted congressional prescriptions over the past fifty years, the antidote for racism increasingly immunizes each succeeding generation, if only exponentially.
In the second half of the 19th Century, following the Civil War (or the War of Northern Aggression), home-grown terrorism during the "reconstruction" of Confederate states embolden any number of white people who set about conducting an al-Qaeda-styled reign of terror upon recently Emancipated African slaves, but a campaign of terror unchecked by government officials or law enforcement.
 The movie is based on two novels by Thomas Dixon:
The Clansman and The Leopard’s Spots.
Griffith, whose father had served as a colonel in the Confederate Army, crafted a soapy melodrama of white terrorists in South Carolina, where no honest civil authority ruled this former Confederate state. Inefficient government in 1865 allowed for lawlessness in the political vacuity of civil unrest between those who deemed the Negro as “free” and those who refused to accept emancipation.
During the Reconstruction Era, there existed no popularly accepted governing authority, but rather a mob of white anarchists with heads covered in white sheets assuming absolute liberty in doing harm to the Negro with entitlement and impunity.
Violence committed by the Ku Klux Klan overwhelmed the American Negro with an eternal sense of imminent danger. Non-recognition of authority freed the Klan to commit the most heinous acts upon a human being with the central goal of “white-supremacy” being to reject the laws of the United States by employing terrorism for which there is no end to justify the means.
For the American Negro in this post-bellum hemorrhaging of the U.S. Constitution, the Union itself had become a failed-state with whole regions unstable in going about their “business” without the proper governance. Overlooked in the romanticized utopia of D.W. Griffith’s film, the voices of the Klan with both the volume and vitriol of latter-day radical religious fanatics expressed the ugliness of terrorism: White Americans in the name of God crying out for the blood of African-Americans. As if given some divine license to kill, they lynched the Negro at will for over 100 years; their chaos unrestrained by any civilized principles, common standards or religious adherence—so extreme that (among others) an entire black community in Oklahoma ceased to exist.
At the time of its release, THE BIRTH OF A NATION received the unreserved admiration of then President Woodrow Wilson who found no fault with the Ku Klux Klan. The movie, in placing its white protagonist (rather than its black victim) at the center of the film, sanctified the founding generation of organized domestic terrorism, with the Klan’s tentacles extending throughout all branches of the local, state and federal government, reaching all the way to Washington D.C.
The hate-mongering kudzu, extending beyond the trellis of President Wilson’s White House, wrapped its tendrils around the Capitol dome, even creeping up the steps to the Supreme Court.
 D.W. Griffith’s belief was that after the United States ran the gantlet of the Civil War, the country had emerged from the crucible of Reconstruction as the result of the Ku Klux Klan unifying the nation. Not even in shouting distance of reality, the movie’s narrative pointedly ignores the intolerable reality of vigilante justice in the Deep South and across the entirety of the United States.
 THE BIRTH OF A NATION premiered on February 8, 1915 and remained the most profitable film of all time until the 1937 release of SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS. The American public, fickle about its entertainment, had moved on.
Although adjudication of the law by armed authority has proven the most effective violence-reduction technique known to civilization, a citizen—white or otherwise—with a not-so-strongly developed sense of faith in the government will inevitably initiate a campaign of terror when the country swings precipitously toward the abyss.
The United States Department of Homeland Security's Office of Intelligence and Analysis issued a report suggesting that current political and economic conditions have energized right-wing extremists. The racism already shown toward Barack Obama, the first U.S. African-American president, has obviously engendered an inestimable number of so-called "patriotic" citizens to think about seceding from the Union.
This sort of "verbal" anarchy, so far, has been shrewd enough not to spew racist venom but channel it through "tea party" protest, letting their racism leak out then rise into a bad smell.
Rick Perry, governor for the state of Texas, stating that Washington has abandoned the country's founding principles of limited government, answered news reporters recently by suggesting that Texans might at some point want to secede from the union. The mantra, "My country, right or wrong," shouted during the George W. Bush era of invasion and rendition appears now no longer valid under the Obama administration.
 The governor of Texas doesn't speak for the majority of Texans, of course, but only those who wish to cut off President Obama at the knees to obviate his efforts in rescuing the country from economic chaos and widespread depression, fearful that any success in stemming fiscal collapse might elevate the president to a niche on Mount Rushmore.
The objective on September 11, 2001 was to cause lawlessness, disorder, and civil unrest. However, the general population had remained intact and the civil authority in charge. Grievous loss of life notwithstanding, the objective of the attack was not reached. In other words, “terror” is a means to an end but cannot exist without agitation from, say, The Joker. But like any other anarchists who employs terrorism, not even The Joker can succeed—or the Ku Klux Klan—when people refuse to live in fear.
Following the September 11th attack—and the Emancipation Proclamation before it—a Truth-and-Reconciliation-styled commissions might have helped ameliorated the rampant paranoia and dark suspicions that always accompany great social and political change in the country, where upheaval has left a deep impact upon the psyche of the United States.
But whether it's racial terrorism by the Ku Klux Klan defending the “honor” of white women in the name of God, or a religious fatwa setting fanatics on a jihad in the name of Allah, the violent “culture of honor” and the enduring history of anarchy are well beyond the reach of civil law…or global war.
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