The lies that follow a terrorist attack

Most of what you will read about the Paris attacks will not be true. The basic facts, that 8 people went on a killing spree, and that nearly a hundred and fifty people were killed, and many others wounded, can be verified. But almost immediately after that the stories begin. The first odd thing, of course, was the claim that a Syrian passport was found with one of the terrorists. This was amazing, as terrorists generally do not carry identifying documents on their person - remember how document-free the people who attacked Bombay in 2008 were? Why would a man on a suicide mission carry a passport? And a Syrian passport, how is that plausible? If this is an attack by the Islamic State (IS), Daesh, or whatever one calls that monster in the centre of the Middle East, then it is very unlikely to be a Syrian. Very few Syrians have joined this group. Most that have tried have been executed as possible spies working on behalf of the Syrian ruler, Bashar Al-Assad.

And is it truly IS? Sadly, we have to question that as well. Charlie Winter, an analyst on militant movements, noted that even after the attacks had taken place on November 14, no claim had appeared in the official journal of IS, Al Hayat. When the claim was finally made it contained no information that could not already be gleaned from press reports. This seems odd in of itself. You would think that the organisation that planned the attacks would know more than the journalists reporting on it, but their information seemed to be both late and less detailed, almost as if they were claiming credit (if that is what we can call this terrible act) for something they were learning about from the press.

A complicated history of half-truths

This is not the first time that Paris has been struck by Islamist militants. In 1995 the Paris metro was bombed, allegedly by the Groupe Islamique Armé (GIA). The GIA was an Islamist militant group that had sprung up after the Algerian military had cancelled the elections of 1991 in what was basically a military coup to stop the Front Islamique du Salut (FIS) from winning the elections. In the ensuing civil war the GIA arose as the possibly the most brutal militant outfit. The French government, the former colonial ruler of Algeria (also the US, and every other NATO power), forcefully backed the Algerian military in its battle to crush both the militants and any democratic rule. Over time the violence continued unabated and it became hard to tell who was more brutal, the government or the militants, or even who was responsible for the latest massacre. In fact, by 1994, the Département du Renseignement et de la Sécuritéthe (DRS) the Algerian secret service had allegedly placed its own chosen Islamist, Djamal Zitouni, as the head of the GIA. In other words the head of the terrorist that the DRS were supposedly fighting was a DRS plant!

In 1995 the winds started to blow in another direction. Italy called for a meeting in Rome to figure out a way to move out of the cycle of violence, and move towards democracy. The FIS was invited, and the Rome summit explicitly called for the Algerian military to move back to the barracks. According to the book "Françalgérie: Crimes and Lies of the State" by two French investigative journalists, LounisAggoun and Jean-Baptiste Rivoire, the DRS decided that the Rome summit was not in the interests of Algeria. On 11 July 1995, an FIS leader was assassinated, and between 25 July and17 October 1995 a number of explosions rocked Paris, largely attacking the train lines. Zitouni took credit. The Rome summit was cancelled. The violence continued. The DRS, led by the KGB-trained general Mohamed Mediene since 1990, was firmly back in charge, and would remain the power behind the throne until September 2015 - 25 years! - manipulating the scene.

Francois Hollande, the French president, has declared that a pitiless war will be fought, but few wars were as pitiless as that in Algeria, with full French backing. Fouad Ajami, no liberal and somebody who whole-heartedly supported the George W Bush's war on Iraq based on lies, described the Algerian civil war thus, "But two or three years into the terror, the Algerian war was to hatch a true monster, the Groupe Islamique Armée (GIA). Indisputably, the GIA was a bastard child of the encounter between the Islamists and the security services of the regime. The mercy had drained out of the Islamists; they had lost faith in their ability to push the nomenklatura aside. For their part, the military commanders got the opposition they wanted--a nihilist breed who would scare the people and push them into the arms of the security forces. The terror and its dirty tricks had done its work: the ranks of the GIA included killers for hire, Islamists who had been turned around by both torture and inducement, and genuine fanatics making war against God's enemies.Kill the adults to punish them, kill the children to save them: this was the code of the GIA. In the catacombs of this fight to the death, hell had found its enforcers. Many false emirs came out of the bowels of the security forces."

If that does not already sound like IS. I don't know what does. If Monsieur Hollande wants a pitiless war, he just needs to turn back a few pages in the history book, and find that France was smack dab in the middle of it not too long ago.

Gaddafi the Fraud

The horrible story of the Algerian civil war is not the only one full of lies. Muammar Gaddafi, who died unmourned in 2011, played the starring role in the joint Libyan-US story of the mad dictator of Libya. Much of it was stage managed by the United States. In 1981 the US press started to report more and more urgently on Gaddafi. In October "a famous journalist called Jack Anderson wrote a sensational article. It said that Colonel Gaddafi had sent a six-man hit team to the US to assassinate president Reagan. Sources in the administration, he said, had concrete evidence that they were led by the most famous terrorist in the world called Carlos "The Jackal".Then Newsweek said that Gaddafi had equipped them with "bazookas, grenade launchers and even portable SAM-7 missiles capable of bringing down the President's plane". The State department even issued photo fits of the six assassins." The thing was that this was all untrue. A pack of lies made up by the Reagan administration.

As the BBC journalist Adam Curtis explains in his long post on Gaddafi, the dictator of Libya loved it. Such news coverage made him feel important and prestigious. The US military had itself an enemy of its own manufacture and the Libyan dictator had global notoriety - much as any terror attack claimed by IS increases its notoriety, by which it recruits within its ranks. The unfortunate thing is that many journalists happily followed this reporting. It is almost impossible to verify the facts in the terrorism/counter-terrorism beat, and therefore the role of a journalist becomes little more than the purveyor of "leaks" and "exclusives" peddled by unnamed sources. This leads to terrible reporting, including in India, and a great loss of faith in both the media and the government by the public at large who do not know how to process the information.

Playing to the benefit of the terrorists, the media and repressive governments

Unfortunately much of this benefits the terrorists the most. They are legitimately able to claim that your government is lying to you. This may have no impact on the vast majority of people because they are never going to become militants. Unfortunately it might just be the thing needed to tip over those already feeling marginalised. As Raffaelo Pantucci notes in his book, We Love Death as You Love Life, a comprehensive study of all major terrorist plots in the UK in the last twenty years, there is a mix that leads to radicalisation. It has three factors: ideology, grievance and mobilisation. The idea that we are being lied to - while at the same time believing in the idea that there is massive and violent organisation capable of terrorising the world - works very well in favour of the IS. As Will McCants writes, the thrill of working with such an organisation helps IS.

It sadly also benefits a whole set of people who take advantage of the hysteria. This comprises TV hosts yelling for war and mayhem, a secretive counter-terrorism industry that benefits from the fear, and governments that are happy to have a "free hand" to deal with their chosen terrorists. Chinese leaders are quick to denounce that famous "terrorist" the Dalai Lama, while Islam Karimov, the brutal dictator of Uzbekistan who has even had prisoners boiled alive, will be happy to call his opponents terrorists too. Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, states that Israel stands shoulder to shoulder with France, just days after Israeli forces in plainclothes - one even disguised as a pregnant woman - storm into a hospital and kill a man, in the very definition of what is terrorism.

So here is the thing. Terrorism is a fight that is going on in the shadows. It is in the interest of all the people who are involved - the good guys, the bad guys, and the people reporting on it - to lie about it, or at best, twist it to mean something else. All of it demeans the memory of the innocents who have been killed, murdered for no reason other than that the furtherance of bloody crimes. It may be best, therefore, to turn the TV off, to take a breath, take a walk, and keep in mind that there will never be a good reason for innocents to be killed.