Hist freshers deal with terrorism

By: Darren Mooney & Daniel Costigan

The College Historical Society held its annual R’n’L debate on the controversial topic of political violence or terrorism on Wednesday April 4th. Organised exclusively by the Records and Libraries sub-committee, the debate was a roaring success.

This Junior Freshman-run debate was quite an interesting departure from the normal discussions that take place in the chamber during the year.

The vibrant and varied discussion of political violence during the debate was a fantastic reflection on the R’n’L. ’I’ve never seen anything like it,’ commented Hist Auditor James O’Brien. ’The energy and enthusiasm shown by the first-years is just amazing.’

The motion ’ ’One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter’ meant that the speakers didn’t address the House in the usual adversarial manner.

The debate quickly became an invitation for speakers to advance from the motion and tackle more broad and varied concepts. Ideas about the pejorative use of the word ’terrorist’, subjective Western value judgements and the need to come up with objective criteria by which to define a terrorist were discussed. The debate also challenged the audience to question the violent foundation of western democracies and further used varied and unique analogies comparing terrorism to beating someone to death in a night-club, or pondering if the photogenic nature of the victims is what makes us feel so disgusted at the concept. Is killing killing or is terrorism something beyond that’

The highlight of the night was former body double for Uday Hussein, Dr Latif Yahia, asserting that the so-called Democratic Nations didn’t have the principles they so strongly advocated. Dr Yahia alleged widespread corruption, hypocrisy and abuse within the West and challenged us to revise our views of ’terrorists’ as depicted through our news services. ’Two things make the Terrorist,’ he warned the audience: ’The politician ’ and the media.’ At the time of printing, Dr Yahia’s speech has been downloaded over 2500 times from the Hist’s website, www.thehist.com.

Students themselves grappled on whether it was possible to justify terrorism, or if they were simply ’psychopaths’ or ’impressionable idiots’. One student speaker assured the crowd that ’terrorism is not only justifiable, but it’s also effective’. Everyone had a different view and there were no two speeches alike on either side throughout the debate.

The debate was a melting pot of different ideas ’ with speakers disagreeing on what a terrorist was. There was even some discussion as to whether one of the guests, Deirdre Clancy, was a terrorist herself after her disabling of a military jet at Shannon in 2003. Or, as Village columnist Harry Browne suggested, was she a freedom fighter’

The massive variety in the guests and speeches make this debate the best R’n’L debate in a long time.

Top CIA officials openly admit, Al-qaeda is a total and complete fabrication

Made by CIA 100%

BBC’s killer documentary called “The Power of Nightmares“. Top CIA officials openly admit, Al-qaeda is a total and complete fabrication, never having existed at any time. The Bush administration needed a reason that complied with the Laws so they could go after “the bad guy of their choice” namely laws that had been set in place to protect us from mobs and “criminal organizations” such as the Mafia. They paid Jamal al Fadl, hundreds of thousands of dollars to back the U.S. Government’s story of Al-qaeda, a “group” or criminal organization they could “legally” go after. This video documentary is off the hook…

I have been trying to tell the media since the first time that Al-qaeda was ever mentioned anywhere that Al-qaeda was a figment of the American administrations imagination, a tool to rule the masses and get their backing for the administrations war on the world.

Al-qaeda was a double edged sword for the American administration, it firstly drew out any anti-American activists by giving them a sense of belonging, belonging to a group or cell of like minded people, people controlled by the administration, it also gave the administration the freedom to raise the fear levels in the population to fever pitch so that their war machine could to go to work, for if America cannot sell it’s arms, the major corporations cease to exist and therefore so does The United States itself.
In the run up to the next Presidential Election we see Presidential hopefuls vie for the chance to represent their parties, but what we don’t see or sometimes don’t understand is that no matter what candidate actually makes it to the Whitehouse the foreign policy will never change radically, the Faces change but the policies stay the same.
America has been at war with one country or another for 52 years, when it enters a country it never fully leaves, it always keeps a foothold.
1945-1946 China
1950-1953 Korea/China
1954- Guatemala
1958 Indonesia
1959-1961 Cuba
1960 Guatemala
1964 Congo
1965 Peru
1964-1973 Laos
1961-1973 Vietnam
1969-1970 Cambodia
1967-1969 Guatemala
1983 Grenada
1983-1994 Lebanon
1980s El Salvador
1980s Nicaragua
1986 Libya
1987 Iran
1989 Panama
1991 Iraq
1993 Somalia
1998 Sudan
1998 Afghanistan
1999 Yugoslavia
2001-? Afghanistan
2003-? Iraq
It may be argued that as the last remaining superpower America has the responsibility to intervene in situations that occur in the world or help when asked by Sovereign Nations, but what we have seen in the recent past is that the American Administration has ignored the UN and done it’s own thing, what is there to stop the American administration from doing anything that it chooses? Who can stand up to them?
In recent times the world has come to know the horror that is extraordinary rendition, we have learned about covert CIA prisons around the world, for me it was old news, in 1994 when I had fled from Iraq and was living in Austria, I was approached by the CIA, they wanted me to work for them to spy on my fellow countrymen, I was against the Iraqi regime but I had no intention of putting my fellow Iraqis in any more harm than they were already in. I refused to work for them and found myself in a six foot by five foot cell in solitary confinement in a Covert CIA prison in Austria a democratic country or supposedly so. Ten and a half months I spent in that cell with no contact from the outside world, I was badly tortured not for information but because I wouldn’t succumb, eventually I was released, it was a break in the chain of command, a new prison officer had been put on my floor but had not been given the instruction that no-one was to know that I was there, he inadvertently let a visiting Judge into my cell and my release was sealed then and there, the Judge could find no record of me, my supposed crime or length of detainment and on foot of this he ordered my release immediately. He was so concerned that I leave the prison that he brought me to Vienna himself in search of my family.
When my two books “I was Saddam’s Son” and “The Devil’s Double” were released they were used as propaganda for the American administration, I had written them to make the world aware of the situation in Iraq, not to be used as an excuse to invade, occupy and make life even tougher than it had already been for the Iraqis, you may argue that Iraq now has a democratically elected government, but at what human cost 1.4 million Iraqis have died,5 million are displaced inside and outside Iraq something that never happened during Saddam Hussein’s 35 year dictatorship , five years along Iraqis still have no proper sanitation, electricity is sporadic and unemployment is high, the New government lives in “The Green zone” and is terrified to leave it for fear of asasination attempts, billions of dollars have been stolen by former Ministers in the Interim government and Iraqi gangs. Kidnapping and extortion is the new commerce, daily, civilians are killed by roadside/suicide bombs and militias rule the streets, Whole areas are walled in with special identity cards maybe they should be made to wear yellow crescents?
Will the American army ever leave Iraq? well 50+ years after WW II they still haven’t fully left Germany or Japan.
To prepare for the future we must learn from the past, so why is it we keep repeating it?

In November 2006 I released my last book “The Black Hole” it recounted my experiences in Europe since fleeing Iraq, most people think that since I left Iraq my life has been a bed of Roses,I have several European citizenships under my belt and I am a multi-millionaire. If it were so I would indeed be a happy man, but unfortunately it is not. Having lived in Europe for the past 17 years 11 of which I have spent in Ireland, I am still stateless, the CIA have made many promises to me, namely that if I do not co-operate I will spend the rest of my life without a country, they have kept this promise. I am happily married to an Irish woman we have Irish children and I am on my third application for Naturalization as an Irish citizen. I am not a multi-millionaire and my royalties from “The Black Hole” go to charity, unfortunately the charity is not doing as well as it could because my book has been banned in Ireland and America, you will not find it in any bookshop, fortunately for me there are virtual bookshops like Amazon or my publisher’s website www.arcanum-publishing.com where it is available.
Is it not surprising to you that this book should be blacked out in this way, if I had continued to write against Iraq or Saddam I guarantee it would be in every major bookshop on the bestseller shelf like the first two, but because it goes against the “agenda” and talks openly about my experiences in Democratic European countries with the CIA and how they have and still are affecting my life, it is on the banned list.
I do not write about myself because I feel important or that I am some sort of celebrity, I write about my life because the world needs to know what can happen to an ordinary person in an extraordinary situation.
In recent times I have had emails, websites, blogs, youtube etc all closed and deleted without warning or explanation, I had nothing of a terrorist or violent nature on these sites and yet someone somewhere saw fit to shut me down, how is it that Al-Qaeda can have it’s own website showing people being beheaded, murdered etc and not be shut down if it is not affiliated to some power or government, how is it that we hear nothing from Bin Laden until the day before an election or some poll/bill that GW Bush needs to win and lo and Behold there he is threatening this that or the other, I put it to you that Bin Laden doesn’t live in some cave in the Tora Bora mountains he lives two doors down on Pennsylvania Ave so his buddy GW can get him to the studios everytime his ratings plummet.
On the day that G W Bush once again refused to sign into policy that the CIA cannot use torture as a method of information gathering, I say to you that that is all they know. In my life I have met many Intelligence agencies and in my opinion the CIA are the most inexperienced and unintelligent of them all.
Best regards to you all and work for Peace!

Latif Yahia.

Click For the Documentary Film

Be a citizen of the world !!!

Can I tell you how I changed myself and maybe we can use the experience as an excperiment, maybe we could all try it for one day and see how we feel afterwards?
The first step is to stop being whatever it is that you are (American, Afghani, Iraqi, Iranian, Israeli, Palestinian, Ukrainian, or anything else!)You must now look upon youself as a citizen of the world, a world as it was created millions of years ago with no borders and no passports.
This is how you breakdown the political rule.
If you make every country your country then you will never want to hurt it or anyone that comes from it, I suppose it is a bigger sense of national pride, International Pride!
A very small percentage of people will always cause harm, there are three reasons for this.
1. Mental Illness
2. Propaganda (media, political, religious)
3.Money (maybe I should have put money 1st)
If we look upon the whole world and each religion and culture as our own we will be less likely to look down on anyone as we would be looking down upon ourselves.
There are common threads in all religions, we should always remember that instead of focusing on the differences. Stop saying I am and say we are.
I look at everyone without a political or religious tag, that way I can talk happily with everyone without all the crap that happened to me clouding my mind and I am far happier for it! If for instance I started thinking differently, Oh Americans are in my country, Israeli's are hurting Palestinians, Palestinians are suicide bombers etc Iraqi's are murderers, Afghani's are the drugs dealers to the world, Iranians want to be a superpower to destroy the world, Ukraininas are selling dirty bombs to the terrorists and the third world.Do you think if we continue to think like this that there will ever be peace in the world? Who perpetuates all of these stereotypes? the media? Our governments? Ourselves? The biggest proof for me that our views are nutured not natural, was when the jeep overturned in the dessert. NO-one cared whether the person inside was this or that we all just jumped to help! This means that inside us we are human and as humans we care!
It is important to have transparency in our disscussions, maybe we could start with "This is what I was made to believe" and maybe we can end with "This is what I CHOOSE to believe"
Maybe people may think that I am a dreamer but sometimes dreams come true if you work hard and honestly with all your heart. Not for us now but for our children and grandchildren are we breaking the ice.
Best regards,
Dr.Latif Yahia.
working for peace around the world

Our YOUTUBE could be shut down

http://www.youtube.com/arcanumpublishing

We use Youtube to see what terrestial TV will not show us Reality, the reality of what is happening in our world. Do not be surprised if one day you try to click on our channel and it had been deleted, we have received two warnings,because we put up two exclusive clips of American soldiers in Iraq killing dogs for fun, we disagree with the taking of any life but when others are allowed to upload clips of be-headings etc and cruelty to our fellow human beings you would have to wonder where our humanity is? Keep watching for as long as you can, it is only a matter of time before we are completely censored!
YouTube was famous around the world for letting the people exercise their right to free speech but since they have been taken over by Google (who have previously deleted three of our other websites) it remains to be seen how open they will be in the weeks and months to come, we do not show video clips for shock value, we truly believe before we upload any video that it's content must be seen by as many people as possible so they can make their own judgment.For us it all adds to the story of the documentary we are making, each time we receive a warning or loose a website it is recorded on film. Is the end of Youtube nigh? in the end will all we be able to see on Youtube is sex clips because they will be all that is allowed? Wake up, there's a world out there and it needs to be saved and the story must be viewed.
For Peace.
Latif Yahia
http://www.youtube.com/arcanumpublishing