14 years since 9/11 and we’re still so deathly afraid of terrorists that we freak the fuck out and arrest and handcuff a teenage honor student for making a clock and bringing it to school. To no ones surprise, his name was Ahmed Mohamed.

Home of the brave, indeed.

That’s what’s going on in the homeland. Meanwhile, in the Middle-East we’re busy palling around with terrorists as part of a foreign policy that makes less and less sense with each passing day. Many have commented on the fact that America has, “descended into a morass of fearful confusion,” with the arrest of Ahmed but few have noticed the fundamental contradictions in the whole war on terror narrative. We’re scared to death of scary-brown terrorists here in the homeland yet we’re busy employing Al Qaeda, our supposed arch-enemy and also scary-brown terrorists, in Syria as a force to overthrow Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.

Close US allies, especially Saudi Arabia, also sponsor terrorism and terrorists, according to no less an authority than Vice President Joe Biden. Biden claims that Saudi Arabia and the other Arab gulf states “poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tens of thousands of tons of military weapons into … Al Nusra and Al Qaeda and the extremist elements of jihadis coming from other parts of the world,” groups that eventually morphed into ISIS.

Noted MIT Professor of Linguistics, Noam Chomsky, comments on this support for terrorists by US allies and what sort of Frankenstein monster they have created. “Among Islamic states, Saudi Arabia is far in the lead as a sponsor of Islamic terror, not only by direct funding by wealthy Saudis and others in the Gulf but even more by the missionary zeal with which the Saudis promulgate their extremist Wahhabi-Salafi version of Islam through Quranic schools, mosques, clerics, and other means available to a religious dictatorship with enormous oil wealth. The ISIS is an extremist offshoot of Saudi religious extremism and its fanning of jehadi flames.”

I’m really starting to think there’s something to the whole deep state thing with the schizophrenic nature of US policy towards Syria in utilizing Sunni terrorists as a means to carry out regime change while simultaneously bombing them. Why, it’s almost like there are two centers of power vying for control over US foreign policy.

To fully comprehend how the war on terror narrative was rewritten–from fighting Al Qaeda to utilizing them–a good place to start is The Redirection, by Seymour Hersh, written in 2007, during the last years of the Bush administration. It’s scary how prescient that article was.

When one examines the US history of employing Sunni terrorists for foreign policy objectives, a pattern emerges. It turns out that employing terrorism is a brutally efficient and cost effective means of advancing American objectives. These objectives amount to fragmenting states and destroying social bonds across societies, all the better to plunder resources and control political trajectories.

The only problem with this approach, in addition to the obvious moral quandaries, is that the neoconservatives who have formulated and are busy carrying out these horrible policies are the gang that couldn’t shoot straight. Pretty much everything they have touched has turned to shit. They have an epic record of failure yet not one of them has ever been held accountable. Even more alarming is that even as they lurch from one catastrophe to the next they still wield powerful levers of power within the US government and elite media.

In the meantime, we are left to stew in the “Islamaphobia” and racism stirred up by the neoconservative architects of the endless war on terror. Given that American citizens live in a sea of ignorance, these sorts of crazy incidents like the arrest of Ahmed for bringing a clock to school will become normalized.