US State Department report on global terrorism self-contradictory

Press TV has interviewed E. Michael Jones, the editor of Culture Wars online magazine, to discuss an annual report by the US State Department on global terrorism which includes allegations against Iran.

A rough transcription of the interview appears below.

Press TV: What are the American goals in essentially leveling such allegations against Iran?

Jones: I think what you have here is a report that is determined more by ideology than it is by any serious attempt to identify and combat terrorism.

It reminds me of what Yasser Arafat used to say, ‘one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.’

The report identifies ISIS as a terrorist group and then in the same report it identifies Iran as a sponsor of terrorism. Who is fighting ISIS in Syria and Iraq? It seems to be it is Iran. So the report is self-contradictory. The problem here is that the United States is committed to a certain scenario in the Middle East. There are 28 pages missing from the report of 9/11 attacks probably because they implicate the Saudi government in that but the Saudis are America’s ally so therefore they can’ be implicated.

So if we put all these together we have a report that says more about ideology and more about the axe that the State Department has to grind in any real report on the objective facts about terrorism.

Press TV: Putting these American accusations recently leveled against Iran among other countries, China and Russia of course but focusing on Iran, then thinking of the infamous American war on terror which began so many years ago, how do you think that the so-called war on terror has been effective in essentially stopping terrorism in the region and to what extend has it been successful unfortunately so in spreading it further out in the region?

Jones: The war on terror is bound up with proxy warfare and proxy warfare is a regular warfare and Liddell Hart, the famous English strategist, says it always comes back to bite you I mean blowback is an intrinsic part of proxy warfare. So just everyone knows that the United States supported these proxy warriors in Afghanistan to drive the Soviets out of the country. One of them they supported was Osama Bin Laden and now Osama Bin Laden bites them back with the attacks on 9/11.

So it is full of this type of blowback and there is no way to solve that problem. If there is always going to be a problem if you are paying other people to fight for you because they have minds of their own and oftentimes their minds are formed not by the people paying them the money but by the people who they think are telling the truth and in this case it was the Wahabbi extremists they learned in the madrassas in Pakistan rather than the United States Constitution or whatever that informed their ideas and so they turned on the people that supported them. It is time to wake up to this fact that that is endemic. That is an occupational hazard of proxy warfare.