via: The Free Thought Project

A clandestine CIA counter-terrorism officer, Amaryllis Fox, currently in the process of getting her cover rolled back, spoke publicly for the first time with Al Jazeera Plus (AJ+)  regarding her experience as a counter-terrorism agent, and the insights she gained into the mind of the enemy.

Fox worked as a counter-terrorism and intelligence specialist for the CIA’s clandestine services, and was stationed across the globe for almost a decade during the 2000s.

“If I learned one lesson from my time with the CIA, it is this: everybody believes they are the good guy,” Fox said.

The former undercover CIA officer goes on to explain how powerful interests fuel both sides of the conflict by embracing a false narrative that enriches a small number of elite in both the Western and Islamic world at the expense of the many.

“If you’re walking down the street in Iraq or Syria and ask anybody why America dropped bombs, you get: ‘They were waging war on Islam,’” Fox notes.

In the U.S., when Americans are asked why they were attacked on 9/11 the common refrain heard is: “they hate us because we’re free.”

The problem with these narratives is that they fail to address the underlying issues with American foreign policy that create these feedback loops of violence.

“Those are stories manufactured by a really small number of people on both sides who amass a great deal of power and wealth by convincing the rest of us to keep killing each other…”

“I think the question we need to be asking, as Americans examining our foreign policy, is whether or not we’re pouring kerosene on a candle. The only real way to disarm your enemy is to listen to them. If you hear them out, if you’re brave enough to really listen to their story, you can see that more often than not, you might have made some of the same choices if you’d lived their life instead of yours…”

“An Al-Qaeda fighter made a point once during debriefing,” Fox recalled. “He said all these movies that America makes — like Independence Day, and the Hunger Games, and Star Wars — they’re all about a small scrappy band of rebels who will do anything in their power with the limited resources available to them to expel an outside, technological advanced invader. ‘And what you don’t realize,’ he said, ‘is that to us, to the rest of the world, you are the empire, and we are Luke and Han. You are the aliens and we are Will Smith…’”

“And while it may be easier to dismiss your enemy as evil, hearing them out on policy concerns is actually an amazing thing, because as long as your enemy is a subhuman psychopath that’s gonna attack you no matter what you do, this never ends. But if your enemy is a policy, however complicated — that we can work with.”

When we demonize those we disagree with the likelihood of finding peaceful resolution diminishes exponentially, as we begin to perceive them as less human. The way to solve these issues is to begin to understand that the vilification of groups of people only serves to entrench and embolden violence, and that engaging in substantive policy discussions is truly the only way forward.

“The truth is that when you talk to people who are really fighting on the ground, on both sides, and ask them why they’re there, they answer with hopes for their children, specific policies that they think are cruel or unfair,” Fox said.

“And while it may be easier to dismiss your enemy as evil, hearing them out on policy concerns is actually an amazing thing, because as long as your enemy is a subhuman psychopath that’s gonna attack you no matter what you do, this never ends. But if your enemy is a policy, however complicated — that we can work with.”
Read more at http://thefreethoughtproject.com/undercover-cia-operative-breaks-cover-give-insight-mind-the-enemy/#fLLgAkYBl9d23m52.99