January 5, 2009, Kaieteur News, Jihad or Ji-hard?, by Tony Deyal,

January 5, 2009, Kaieteur News, Jihad or Ji-hard?, by Tony Deyal, 

Twenty-two percent of Americans can name all five members of the television cartoon series “The Simpson Family” while only one in 1,000 knows the five freedoms guaranteed under the American constitution.

According to Ignorant America: Just How Stupid Are We? by Rick Shenkman, "Polls over the past three decades measuring Americans' knowledge of history show similarly dismal results. What happened in 1066? Just 10 per cent know it is the date of the Norman Conquest. Who said the 'world must be made safe for democracy'? Just 14 per cent know it was Woodrow Wilson.

Which country dropped the nuclear bomb? Only 49 per cent know it was their own country. Who was America's greatest president? According to a Gallup poll in 2005, a majority answer that it was a president from the last half century: 20% said Reagan, 15% Bill Clinton, 12% John Kennedy, 5% George W. Bush. Only 14% picked Lincoln and only 5%, Washington… in 1983, just 81% knew who Lee Harvey Oswald was and that, in 1985, only 81% could identify Martin Luther King, Jr."

The intelligence of Americans has always been an issue. For example, how bright is a President who says, "Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream" or "I think anybody who doesn't think I'm smart enough to handle the job is underestimating."

If the President, in this case George W. Bush, is that dumb, what does it say about the people who elected him? Nobody elects Vice Presidents, but what does it say of the country he represented when Dan Quayle said, "A low voter turnout is an indication of fewer people going to the polls."

It might be wrong to judge a people by their politicians, but what about their other public figures? Here are a few interesting quotes. The first is from singer Mariah Carey on the death of the King of Jordan, "I loved Jordan. He was one of the greatest athletes of our time." The second is from another celebrity, Britney Spears, "I get to go to lots of overseas places, like Canada."

What does it say of the intelligence of Americans that a bank robber on September 5, 2007, wrote a note on one of his own cheques demanding money from a bank teller and another did the same on December 30, 2008?

You could say that I am using the wrong examples and that the intelligence of Americans cannot be judged by the samples I have chosen. Just like time is a foreign magazine in Jamaica and elite is a clothing manufacturer in Trinidad, "intelligence" is a rock bank in Seattle, a psychology journal, a short film and, fittingly, a version of solitaire.

Granted that George W., Quayle, Britney and Mariah might be a few cards short of a full deck, let us use as our yardstick an institution created and maintained by America which has intelligence as its middle name – the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

While some of you might say that "intelligence" in this context means "information gathering for the purposes of national security and defence," it still requires intelligence to do so intelligently.

In 1955, the animated version of George Orwell's "Animal Farm" had a completely different ending from the original novel. According to an article on the CIA's dirty tricks by Laurence Zuckerman in the New York Times (March 18, 2000), at the end of the book the other farm animals looked back and forth between the tyrannical pigs and the exploitative humans and were unable to distinguish between them.

In the movie, the humans were removed and only the pigs remained. The reason? The CIA had bought the film rights and wanted to make the message of the film more overtly anti-communist.

An article by Ryan Singel in June 2007 summarised the history of the CIA, "In its first 25 years, the Central Intelligence Agency violated its charter by plotting assassinations, funding behavioural and drug studies that included "unwitting participants," opening U.S. mail, creating dossiers on nearly 10,000 American dissidents, wiretapping journalists to root out their sources, and interrogating a Soviet defector against his will for two years…" A favourite target was Cuba's President, Fidel Castro. In addition to assassination attempts and the Bay of Pigs invasion, the CIA plotted to put something in Castro's cigar that would cause his beard to fall off and reduce his credibility with the Cuban people.

Now, in Afghanistan the CIA is passing out Viagra to jaded Afghan warlords in return for support against the Taliban. Joby Warrick, writing in the Washington Post, says, "For U.S. intelligence officials, this is how some crucial battles in Afghanistan are fought and won."

While the CIA has a long history of buying information with cash, the growing Taliban insurgency has prompted the use of novel incentives and creative bargaining to gain support in some of the country's roughest neighborhoods, according to officials directly involved in such operations."

Some of the other "novel incentives" include pocketknives and tools, medicine or surgeries for ailing family members, toys and school equipment, tooth extractions and travel visas.

I suppose, for the CIA, this is not the last stand and perhaps after Viagra's role in facilitating Afghanistans, the CIA will stiffen its support for Pakistans, Turkestans, Uzbekistans and others yet to come.

The CIA is elated because one old Afghani chief called the CIA operative who gave him Viagra "A great man."  What the CIA with its limited intelligence does not realise is that it cannot win the Afghan war because the real targets of their operations, the Taliban, are immune to such inducements. They are already hardened Jihadists who stiffly resist US domination, and even their recruits are up-and-coming fundamentalists.