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Osama bin Laden: Dead but not Gone |
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Saturday, 24 September 2011 06:11 |
On the day before September 11, 2001, Osama bin Laden was an obscure figure, a nobody on the world stage. But for the arrogance, ignorance, and ineptitude of our leaders, he still would be.
The tenth anniversary of 9/11, a national day of remembrance and mourning, was regrettably also an occasion for media hype, commercial exploitation, and red-hot, self-serving, pseudo-patriotic rhetoric – the very kind of arrogant, polarizing, provocative, bring-it-on political trash talk that has become the coin of the realm in America's sprawling secret government-within-a-government.
This new Homeland Security State is built upon the preexisting National Security State created after 1948 in response to the perceived Communist threat to freedom and democracy and the phoenix-like postwar rise of the "totalitarian" Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin. But the military build-up in the 1950s did not break the federal piggy bank. Today, the United States is saddled with a massive federal debt, mired in two wars we can neither stop nor win, and weakened by an anemic economy rooted in deep structural problems. Meanwhile, our damaged leaders dither.
How did we go from superpower to giant-with-feet-of-clay so quickly? Who or what is to blame?
In 1943, the late Sidney Hook wrote a book entitled the Hero in History. Hook's mentor was William James, the great pragmatist who was instrumental in changing the way generations of scholars and policy-makers think about the world. Though an avowed Marxist in his early career, Hook was to become one of America's leading anti-Communist intellectuals.
A hero in Hook's paradigm is a "great man or woman in history...of whom we can say...that if they had not lived when they did, or acted as they did, the history of their countries and of the world...would have been profoundly different." Hook divided the great men and women in history – "heroes" by his definition – into two categories, those who were event-made and those who made events. The first applies to the majority of history's most famous personalities from Alexander the Great to Napoleon and Abe Lincoln.
As for the second category – history's event-makers – Hook himself had difficulty finding any figure who did more than ride a wave, who actually turned the tide of history. He made a good case for Lenin as an event-maker, arguing that without Lenin there would have been no October Revolution. By Hook's reckoning, Lenin changed the trajectory of Russian history, and in so doing changed world history.
Are any other historical figures about whom the same can be said? The founders of the world's great religions – Jesus Christ, the Prophet Mohammed, the Buddha – spring readily to mind. What about conquerors like Alexander the Great or Napoleon? Possibly, but Alexander died on the eve of his 33rd birthday and although he never lost a battle and his conquests spanned most of the known world the Alexandrian empire was short-lived. And Napoleon had no hand in bringing about the French Revolution that preceded – and prepared the way for – his rise to power.
My candidate for the event-maker of the 21st century – an individual who ranks with Lenin and few if any others in modern world history – is Osama bin Laden. Notice that I can't bring myself to use the word "hero" in the same sentence or even to call OBL a "great man" (for the same reason that I can't apply either of those two terms to, say, Adolf Hitler). Nonetheless, who can deny that Osama bin Laden changed Washington and the world – and not in a good way.
Still, his bin Laden's would have failed utterly as an event-maker had it not been for the timing of 9/11, a stroke of extraordinary luck, coming as it did in the aftermath of a cliffhanger election that was decided in a 5-4 ruling by the US Supreme Court (Bush v. Gore), rather than the voters.
The result of that vote, in a nutshell (literally), was to make George W. Bush the Commander in Chief of the world largest military establishment and put the likes of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, and Paul Wolfowitz in charge of telling the clueless "Decider" what to decide.
We all know the rest of the story, which can be summed up in three little words – war on terror. A decade later, the number of coalition deaths in Afghanistan stood 2,649 (September 18, 2011). Of those, 1,701 were Americans, by far the largest number among the coalition partners. In Iraq, the latest Pentagon figures place the death toll for US at 4,475. The total for these two wars has gone well over 7,000 and that's only for US fatalities – coalition partners' fatalities take the totals considerably higher. Estimates of civilian fatalities run into hundreds of thousands.
The cost of the war on terror in dollars and cents is unknowable. Experts differ on what to count and the government deliberately fudges the numbers in all kinds of ways. In July 2010, CNN reported that the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had exceeded $1 trillion. One study concluded that the war on terror will cost at $3.7 trillion when all is said and done but cautioned that the cost could go as high as $4.4 trillion. By comparison, World War II cost $4.1 trillion (in current dollars)
Nor can all costs be measured in statistics. Consider the loss of liberty and privacy in our daily lives, of public confidence in government and the economy, and of respect for America – both as a country and as an ideal – around the world. The soft power we once had has all been squandered as a direct result of substituting hard power for smart politics, statesmanship, and diplomacy.
The United States has already lost the war on terror, no matter what happens from here on out. Thanks to a tragic failure of leadership, Osama bin Laden has won it.
Meanwhile, his power over our lives continues beyond the grave.
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Cassandra - On the Anniversary of 9/11 |
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Sunday, 11 September 2011 14:03 |
One of the messages coming from New York is that New Yorkers are suffering from 9/11 fatigue. For ten years it's been an ongoing, daily thing. I cannot imagine being forced to remain in mourning forever; to wear my widow's weeds or black armband, or what have you, and be reminded of my loss, every,
single, day.
If that were me, I would think, for the love of god, pour me a drink and put on some music. Or, tell me a joke, and make me laugh. I want to delight in the joy of life with people. Yes? Life is for the living. So I, for one, would like the
families to be able to get on, without having the emotional wound torn open all the time. Enough. Plus, the constant reminders are not for their benefit,
anyway. What's behind the curtain using 9/11 as a prop doesn't give a damn about them.
On CNN last night, Piers Morgan was talking to a survivor. I liked him and felt bad for him. He lost hundreds of friends and colleagues. All of them were at their desks at work when the tower was hit. His brother was up there, too.
Just like every 9/11 story, it tears your heart out. He found renewed purpose resurrecting his business in order to help the families. A good man.
In another segment, we learn that some 9/11 family members have developed an educational package to facilitate discussion about terrorism in classrooms. Kids are encouraged to open up and share what they believe a terrorist looks
like. Then, the class would learn about white guys like Timothy McVeigh (homegrown American terrorist) or that blond, blue-eyed Norwegian lunatic who murdered dozens of innocent young people, recently. Their point: people who turn to violence to achieve political objectives surface in all different
religions, cultures and regions of the world.
The 9/11 families who started the educational project do not want the legacy of those they lost, to be more hate spreading in the world. I love these guys.
When it happened, I was at home watching television in the morning and, like the rest of the world, I just couldn't believe my eyes. I'm standing in my socks in the middle of the living room yelling, yelling, oh my god oh my god. Then...
they're going to need help. What do they need, and I spent hours on the phone, and eventually I got through to a way station down there, got some info, and tried to relay back here what kinds of things could help the rescuers.
I have blood relatives down there. Not close. But they are still part of my extended family. They could have been in there, and I couldn't do anything for
them - or anybody else. That was the worst part of it.
Tied for worst was what I knew the Bush administration would try to pull off next. I mean, I knew.
It was absolutely vital that all the questions were explored, both by the country's political leadership, and the mainstream press. A crime was committed. The evidence needed to be laid out, as it would be in any criminal investigation. Evidence is tweezed, first, with questions.
It became immediately clear that the question 'why?' was MIA; a cover-up. It's scary how much of America's elite went along.
If I come across a badly injured person, bleeding, clothes torn, weak and in distress, the first human response is, 'Oh my god! What happened to you, are you ok? Do you need help?'
Next person comes along as you're calling 911, you ask: 'Do you know what happened? Did you see anything?'
At some point after that, somebody will be asking the victim himself, 'Do you have any enemies? Why did this happen? Why would somebody want to do this to you?'
But in the case of 9/11 'why?' was absent. It was absent in the press, and it was absent from the White House. And I will tell you that anyone who posted comments pointing out the obvious after newspaper propaganda pieces, was
immediately censored, including me.
Bush's, 'They hate us for our freedoms - now, if you love your country - go shopping' - was amazing, in its horror. This was not just a little white lie. This was a whopper, out of which a nightmare - war based on lies; the fostering of racist hate - would be fanned into a raging inferno, When so much
carnage had been committed already, do they not see what they've done?
A shadow cabinet embedded within the highest echelons of U.S. power had for several years leading up to 9/11 discussed what future they dreamed of for America. And their dream was that the U.S. should become a world empire; seizing the whole thing, one Middle East country at a time, beginning with
Iraq. One individual is on record wistfully noting that a Pearl Harbor would be a gift. A crisis would get the people to rally around anything.
And so the imbroglio to occupy Iraq was soon enough launched, even though Iraq didn't have anything to do with 9/11 whatsoever.
Also, if I recall correctly, the civil liberties-shredding 'Patriot Act' just happened, miraculously, to be ready for Congressional perusal within days of 9/11 - a bound book of proposed changes to federal law roughly the size of a
fifty-pound turkey. Michael Moore made hay over the fact that no Congressman did his due diligence to even read the constitution-bending Patriot Act before voting in favor of the entire thing.
The fact of the matter is that it wasn't Iraq that was any kind of real threat, it was the U.S. government itself that had turned into the enemy domestic.
Conspiracy theories are unnecessary to make the case that the inner sanctum of government was as guilty as if they had flown those planes into the twin towers themselves. Although, I will say that it is a very strange thing that three
skyscrapers miraculously dropped into their footprints, straight down, within seconds. It is my understanding that hundreds of architects and engineers have gone on record to say that this is an absolute impossibility outside of controlled and preplanned demolitions. Building Seven wasn't hit by anything
at all, of course, and yet it fell straight down exactly the same way.
What is odd to me is that not one of the three buildings ended up falling over to the side on their way down. Structurally, that, to me, would have made more sense. Possible explanation? For the sake of limiting massive damage to
neighboring structures and to save lives otherwise, an executive order may have been issued to discharge pre-placed demolition devices. For this to happen the devices may have had to have been built in; a strange thing to do.
So maybe the buildings just defied all the odds and dropped. But I see the point of so-called conspiracy theorists on the question, so far as how the buildings actually fell.
343 New York City firefighters died on 9/11 trying to save people, in part because police and fire did not have the communications equipment they needed. It is a travesty, if true, that ten years later this situation has still not
been rectified.
What the government of the
United States did to provoke the 9/11 attack:
For ten years before 9/11 the U.S. and a few coalition partners held Iraq under military siege and committed genocide. In a desert nation they deliberately bombed out all electrical plants, water treatment facilities, and sewage
treatment plants. Then, John Bolton, U.S. representative at the United Nations, argued that along with everything else on the list, childhood vaccines should be barred from import.
Get it? When a private American citizen, Bert Sacks, tried to do whatever he could to save even a few Iraqi children from dying from preventable, U.S.- caused disease by arranging to import vaccines himself, the U.S. government fined him $10,000 for his egregious offense.
500,000 Iraqi children died.
We broke the law. There was no justification for putting Iraq in a lock-down in the first place.
One reason why we destroyed Iraq is Israel. Israel has held Palestinians captive under brutal military occupation since 1948 - gradually, slowly, ethnically cleansing the native Palestinians from their homes. It's illegal,
immoral, and the rest of the world doesn't like it, including the Arab world.
Rockets were fired from Iraq into Israel, causing panic. Sadaam Hussein held tremendous sympathy for the suffering of the Palestinian people. The Israeli occupation had been permitted to fester for too long.
In reaction to growing Middle Eastern restiveness, Western diplomacy could have gone the other way. The issues could have been brought forward, and a peace deal hammered out. Resolution to the Israel-Palestine unrest could have
been brought to bear. But that didn't happen, because too many people in the U.S. are blind to the situation. So, rather than do the right thing, perhaps partly out of the natural sympathy the West feels over the Holocaust, the U.S. utterly
destroyed Iraq, instead.
Iraq and Palestine aren't the only issues that Osama bin Laden raised in his 'Letter to America'. But they are at the top of the list.
The attack on the World Trade Center was a clear-cut act of terror. But the evil empire is still up and running, still occupying Iraq and Afghanistan; still bombing Pakistan and Yemen; still thinking about attacking Iran; having words
with China, and encircling Russia, while continuing to prop up the apartheid regime of Israel.
Americans are wonderful people. I believe most of the world is willing to cut the average American some slack. At the same time, the government has been trying to overrun the world, drunk on its own power, deluded with a belief in
its own invincibility with hundreds - hundreds! - of military bases, including some thirty alone in Muslim countries.
The only way world history will change course is if Americans vote in a party that will pull back from foreign entanglements and stop the madness. Otherwise, horrifying as it was, I fear that 9/11 was a cakewalk compared to what we can expect sooner or later down the road.
It is high time for Americans to begin to think about the fact that they wouldn't put up with it for one second if the shoe were on the other foot and America were occupied by a foreign power. If the country wants to survive as a
democratic state free from fear, it will have to take on the military and order that the soldiers be brought back home. When President John F. Kennedy, and his brother Robert after him, looked like they might try to do just that, they
were both assassinated, one after the other. War is big business.
Cassandra - a cursed mythical figure who could see the future but was unable to get anyone to listen to what she had to say. She knew what would happen. She just could not do anything about it.
Diane V. McLoughlin, mcloughlinpost.com
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Ten Years On: From Flight Attendant to a Doctoral Defense |
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Friday, 09 September 2011 23:00 |
I was a flight attendant for United Airlines on September 11th, 2001 and the night before I had just returned home to Denver (via SFO) after working an international flight from London. My wife, who was also a flight attendant, dragged me out of bed me that Tuesday morning speaking animatedly about airplanes and tall buildings. Since the events were beyond explanation, she insisted that I shake off the jet-lag and see what was happening for myself. Since that moment, it has been quite difficult for me to divert my attention from those attacks and what they spawned.
The events of that morning had an enormous impact on my country and my life. I reacted to them by pivoting to study terrorism and counterterrorism all the way up to the doctoral level, and the intention here is to trace the path I have followed so as to present my understanding of the anatomy of global terrorism today.
The smashing of two civilian aircraft into the World Trade Center buildings in downtown New York was caught on film and televised while citizens across the country watched in awe as a national symbol collapsed before their eyes. It is in this way that the shocking terrorist attacks became a dramatic and vivid image etched into the psyche of a nation. Terrorism expert Brian Jenkins explained in 1975 that “terrorism is theatre”, and the horrible violence of 9/11 was a veritable spectacle from which people could not turn away.
Democracies tend to be particularly susceptible to provocation via terrorist acts since the spectacular nature of brutal attacks makes good television coverage for a free press, a fact with which terrorist groups are very familiar. Imagery and coverage of such violence intensifies panic and fear, and the short democratic election cycle helps to provoke a rapid and forceful response since politicians wish to be seen as attentive to security concerns.
Yet, while swift and overwhelming force is critical in a conventional military campaign, it is far from certain that the same is also true for effective counterterrorism. Nonetheless, the United States immediately reacted with the most powerful response available; two countries were invaded and the ‘war on terror’ became the signature policy of the presiding administration.
When I was a new flight attendant I had been based out of Newark, New Jersey and had thus worked with some of the crew that were the victims of the box-cutters even before the planes had been become deadly projectile weapons. But I count myself as enormously fortunate not to have lost any loved ones that day having both family and friends in the industry. Since two out of four of the hijacked planes were from United Airlines, my company took a particularly big hit in the depressed economy that followed and the job of flight attendant changed considerably as cuts in the work force and pay ensued.
As a result, I decided to return to university while still working. Studying the phenomenon of terrorism and my country’s reaction to it understandably drew my interest in the international studies program where I enrolled. It was through this M.A. work in Denver that I came to regard the disciplines of international law and political philosophy as most suited for illuminating the central issues of terrorism and counterterrorism in the case of 9/11. Thus to further pursue the marriage of these two branches of learning I regrettably left my job as a flight attendant to accept a position as a doctoral assistant in a prominent home for international law: Geneva, Switzerland where “Philosophy is more studied than the Sword”.
Thus for the last six years I have been researching and studying the attacks of 9/11 and the ‘war on terror’ as my doctoral work. To accomplish what I felt was necessary to properly address this subject I simultaneously completed an LL.M. degree in the international laws of war and human rights. This provided me important background and training for analyzing the applicable norms and codified laws governing cross-border and cross-national violence, detention, force and ill-treatment. Integrating this with political philosophy led me to conceptualizing the idea of the legitimacy of a government as a target of terrorism.
It is well known that individuals choosing the dastardly tactic of targeting non-combatants are much weaker than their government adversary, and so they clearly wish to upend the conventional battlefield. To do so they pursue a ‘strategy of provocation’. That is, they wish to goad a government into overreacting and thus doing injury to itself that could never be achieved by non-state actors: to inflict damage to its own legitimacy.
Ten years on, it is not difficult to see the overreaction that was provoked. By engaging in counterterrorism policies that ran into stark problems of legality, morality and efficacy, the government fell into the legitimacy trap laid by al Qaeda.
A usually deferential U.S. Supreme Court ruled against the government three times over a four-year span in landmark cases. Each time it used different bodies of law to gradually constrain the government, notably using the Geneva Conventions in the Hamdan case of 2006. The Court consistently held in each of these cases that the non-citizens held abroad in Guantánamo were indeed protected by law, and that the courts in fact had a role to play.
The U.S. public watched its government go before the UN Security Council and be refused legal authorization for an invasion of Iraq because the allegations of WMD possession were found to be insufficient (a claim later shown to be palpably false). While this did not stop an invasion, it did force the government to lay out a case that fell apart in the face of facts and before citizens’ eyes as the campaign floundered.
When the infamous ‘Torture Memos’ began to come to light in the context of photographic evidence of ill-treatment of detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, discussion over abusive interrogation techniques bounded into the public sphere. The feeble legal analysis of the international law that had become domestic law was savaged from numerous fronts. The morality of torture had no justification in the absence of any factual attack averted. And the effectiveness of ill-treatment was indefensible since the innocent and ill-informed who were pulled into the program and tortured had nothing to offer.
Each of these policies raised very basic questions in citizens’ minds about the state itself, aptly described by Max Weber as “the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force”. Political philosophy helps to expose this insight as central to any functioning society, thus the logical next step is to find ways to determine how force might be exercised in ways that are considered legitimate across international borders and against foreign nationals.
The 2006 U.S. Army Field Manual on Counterinsurgency overseen by General Petraeus highlights the centrality of legitimacy over and over again in discussing modern warfare. General Petraeus’ manual instructively explains,
“Illegitimate actions are those involving the use of power without authority. Such actions include unjustified or excessive use of force, unlawful detention, torture, and punishment without trial. Any human rights abuses or legal violations committed by U.S. forces quickly become known throughout the local populace and eventually around the world. Illegitimate actions undermine both long- and short-term COIN [counterinsurgency] efforts.”
The policies listed here as “illegitimate” actually became part and parcel of this war and were eventually exposed to the public by civil servants and soldiers who found them to be just that: illegitimate. Once we understand that the actions of government in response to terrorist acts are often directly related to the legitimate exercise of authority, and consequently central to the conflict, the need for more thoughtful counterterrorism policies becomes imperative.
Much of the last decade of my life has been spent contemplating, investigating and conceptualizing those attacks and our response to them in hopes that we can better develop a counterterrorism policy that reduces the damage we do to ourselves. Today, I am on the cusp of defending my thesis to receive a doctoral degree in law, and this work as a response to those attacks is meant to help us understand and defend the concept of legitimacy as a target.
Steven J. Barela
Geneva, Switzerland
Steven J. BARELA has just finished writing his Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Geneva entitled, Legitimacy as a Target: International Law and the ‘War on Terror’. He has taught at the Korbel School of International Studies at Denver University, and has lectured at l'Université Laval in Québec for their summer school on terrorism.
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Gathering stories |
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Tuesday, 30 August 2011 16:26 |
Gathering stories from the mainstream press, reports from other countries, the work of other researchers, and the contradictory words of members of the Bush administration themselves, a case that leaves very little doubt that the attacks of 9/11 need to be further investigated.
Was the U.S.'s failure to defend itself against the attacks on Sept. 11 a comedy of errors or a brilliant, if cynical, plot by highly placed government officials, or something else? We'll never know as long as the administration stonewalls efforts to get information.
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