Ismail Salami: The Good Terrorists versus the Bad

Washington's Dilemma: The Good Terrorists versus the Bad Terrorists: Terrorism is terrorism, and it cannot be defined otherwise unless the interests of one party tilt the scale in disfavor of another, and the dichoto-mization of the terrorists in Syria into good and bad by the West casts doubts on its claims on democracy. In a somber political tone, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov lashed out as absolutely unacceptable the West's support for the terrorists in Syria, in his exclusive interview with Russia Today. Lavrov said the West has divided the terrorists into bad and acceptable, throwing its support behind the latter. It's absolutely unacceptable, and if we follow this logic it might lead us to a very dangerous situation, not only in the Middle East, but in other parts of the world, if our partners in the West would begin to qualify terrorists as bad terrorists and acceptable terrorists, the Russian foreign minister said. The "dichotomization" of such a grave issue by the West is almost nothing new. The de listing of MKO, a long considered terrorist group by Washington is in line with this process of redefining well established concepts and terms by the West. Paradoxically, the MKO has been supported by Washington, even when it was on the terrorist list. They even received their training at the hands of the Bush administration. In an enlightened article, Seymour Hersh showed that US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) trained members of the Iranian Mujahideen e Khalq (MKO) at a secretive site in Nevada from 2005 to at least 2007. According to Hersh, MKO members were trained in intercepting communications, cryptography, weaponry and small unit tactics at the Nevada site up until President Obama took office. In a separate interview, a retired four star general said that he had been privately briefed in 2005 about the training of MKO members in Nevada by an American involved in the program. He said that they got the standard training in commo, crypto, small unit tactics, and weaponry that went on for six months. They were kept in little pods. He also was told, he said, that the men doing the training were from JSOC, which, by 2005, had become a major instrument in the Bush Administrations global war on terror.