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<font style="font-size: 11pt" size="2"><u><b>9/11
- Was There an Alternative?</b></u></font>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><font
style="font-size: 8pt" size="1">We
are approaching the 10th anniversary of the horrendous
atrocities of
September 11, 2001, which, it is commonly held, changed the
world. On
May 1, the presumed mastermind of the crime, Osama bin Laden,
was
assassinated in Pakistan by a team of elite US commandos, Navy
SEALs,
after he was captured, unarmed and undefended, in Operation
Geronimo.</font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><font
style="font-size: 8pt" size="1">A
number of analysts have observed that although bin Laden was
finally
killed, he won some major successes in his war against the US.
"He
repeatedly asserted that the only way to drive the US from the
Muslim
world and defeat its satraps was by drawing Americans into a
series
of small but expensive wars that would ultimately bankrupt
them,"
Eric Margolis writes. "'Bleeding the US,' in his words. The
United States, first under George W Bush and then Barack Obama,
rushed right into bin Laden’s trap ... Grotesquely overblown
military outlays and debt addiction ... may be the most
pernicious
legacy of the man who thought he could defeat the United States”
-
particularly when the debt is being cynically exploited by the
far
right, with the collusion of the Democrat establishment, to
undermine
what remains of social programs, public education, unions, and,
in
general, remaining barriers to corporate tyranny.</font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><font
style="font-size: 8pt" size="1">The
senior CIA analyst responsible for tracking Osama bin Laden from
1996, Michael Scheuer, wrote shortly after that “bin Laden has
been
precise in telling America the reasons he is waging war on us.
[He]
is out to drastically alter US and Western policies toward the
Islamic world”, and largely succeeded: “US forces and policies
are completing the radicalisation of the Islamic world,
something
Osama bin Laden has been trying to do with substantial but
incomplete
success since the early 1990s. As a result, I think it is fair
to
conclude that the United States of America remains bin Laden’s
only
indispensable ally.” And arguably remains so, even after his
death.</font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><font
style="font-size: 8pt" size="1"><b>The
First 9/11</b></font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><font
style="font-size: 8pt" size="1">Was
there an alternative? There is every likelihood that the Jihadi
movement, much of it highly critical of bin Laden, could have
been
split and undermined after 9/11. The “crime against humanity”,
as
it was rightly called, could have been approached as a crime,
with an
international operation to apprehend the likely suspects. That
was
recognised at the time, but no such idea was even considered.</font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><font
style="font-size: 8pt" size="1">[Reporter]
Robert Fisk [concluded] that the “horrendous crime” of 9/11 was
committed with “wickedness and awesome cruelty”, an accurate
judgment. It is useful to bear in mind that the crimes could
have
been even worse. Suppose, for example, that the attack had gone
as
far as bombing the White House, killing the president, imposing
a
brutal military dictatorship that killed thousands and tortured
tens
of thousands while establishing an international terror centre
that
helped impose similar torture-and-terror states elsewhere and
carried
out an international assassination campaign; and as an extra
fillip,
brought in a team of economists - call them “the Kandahar boys”
-
who quickly drove the economy into one of the worst depressions
in
its history. That, plainly, would have been a lot worse than
9/11.</font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><font
style="font-size: 8pt" size="1">Unfortunately,
it is not a thought experiment. It happened. The only inaccuracy
in
this brief account is that the numbers should be multiplied by
25 to
yield per capita equivalents, the appropriate measure. I am, of
course, referring to what in Latin America is often called “the
first 9/11”: September 11, 1973, when the US succeeded in its
intensive efforts to overthrow the democratic government of
Salvador
Allende in Chile with a military coup that placed General
Pinochet’s
brutal regime in office. The goal, in the words of the Nixon
administration, was to kill the “virus” that might encourage all
those “foreigners [who] are out to screw us” to take over their
own resources and in other ways to pursue an intolerable policy
of
independent development. In the background was the conclusion of
the
National Security Council that, if the US could not control
Latin
America, it could not expect “to achieve a successful order
elsewhere in the world”.</font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><font
style="font-size: 8pt" size="1">The
first 9/11, unlike the second, did not change the world. It was
“nothing of very great consequence”, as Henry Kissinger assured
his boss a few days later.</font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><font
style="font-size: 8pt" size="1">In
the recently published <i>Cambridge University History of the
Cold
War</i>, Latin American scholar John Coatsworth writes that
from that
time to “the Soviet collapse in 1990, the numbers of political
prisoners, torture victims, and executions of non-violent
political
dissenters in Latin America vastly exceeded those in the Soviet
Union
and its East European satellites”, including many religious
martyrs
and mass slaughter as well, always supported or initiated in
Washington. The last major violent act was the brutal murder of
six
leading Latin American intellectuals, Jesuit priests, a few days
after the Berlin Wall fell. The perpetrators were an elite
Salvadorean battalion, which had already left a shocking trail
of
blood, fresh from renewed training at the JFK School of Special
Warfare, acting on direct orders of the high command of the US
client
state.</font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><font
style="font-size: 8pt" size="1">The
consequences of this hemispheric plague still, of course,
reverberate.</font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><font
style="font-size: 8pt" size="1"><b>From
Kidnapping and Torure to Assassination</b></font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><font
style="font-size: 8pt" size="1">On
May 1, 2011, Osama bin Laden was killed in his virtually
unprotected
compound by a raiding mission of 79 Navy SEALs, who entered
Pakistan
by helicopter. After many lurid stories were provided by the
government and withdrawn, official reports made it increasingly
clear
that the operation was a planned assassination, multiply
violating
elementary norms of international law, beginning with the
invasion
itself.</font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><font
style="font-size: 8pt" size="1">There
appears to have been no attempt to apprehend the unarmed victim,
as
presumably could have been done by 79 commandos facing no
opposition
- except, they report, from his wife, also unarmed, whom they
shot in
self-defense when she “lunged” at them, according to the White
House.</font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><font
style="font-size: 8pt" size="1">The
highly regarded British barrister Geoffrey Robertson, who
supported
the intervention and opposed the execution largely on pragmatic
grounds, nevertheless described Obama’s claim that “justice was
done” as an “absurdity” that should have been obvious to a
former professor of constitutional law. Pakistan law “requires a
colonial inquest on violent death, and international human
rights law
insists that the ‘right to life’ mandates an inquiry whenever
violent death occurs from government or police action. The US is
therefore under a duty to hold an inquiry that will satisfy the
world
as to the true circumstances of this killing.”</font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><font
style="font-size: 8pt" size="1">Robertson
usefully reminds us that “[I]t was not always thus. When the
time
came to consider the fate of men much more steeped in wickedness
than
Osama bin Laden - the Nazi leadership - the British government
wanted
them hanged within six hours of capture. President Truman
demurred,
citing the conclusion of Justice Robert Jackson that summary
execution 'would not sit easily on the American conscience or be
remembered by our children with pride ... the only course is to
determine the innocence or guilt of the accused after a hearing
as
dispassionate as the times will permit and upon a record that
will
leave our reasons and motives clear.’”</font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><font
style="font-size: 8pt" size="1">In
societies that profess some respect for law, suspects are
apprehended
and brought to fair trial. I stress “suspects”. In June 2002,
FBI
head Robert Mueller, in what the Washington Post described as
“among
his most detailed public comments on the origins of the
attacks”,
could say only that “investigators believe the idea of the Sept.
11
attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon came from al
Qaeda
leaders in Afghanistan, the actual plotting was done in Germany,
and
the financing came through the United Arab Emirates from sources
in
Afghanistan”.</font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><font
style="font-size: 8pt" size="1">What
the FBI believed and thought in June 2002 they didn’t know eight
months earlier, when Washington dismissed tentative offers by
the
Taliban (how serious, we do not know) to permit a trial of bin
Laden
if they were presented with evidence. Thus, it is not true, as
President Obama claimed in his White House statement after bin
Laden’s death, that “[w]e quickly learned that the 9/11 attacks
were carried out by al-Qaeda”.</font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><font
style="font-size: 8pt" size="1">There
has never been any reason to doubt what the FBI believed in
mid-2002,
but that leaves us far from the proof of guilt required in
civilised
societies - and whatever the evidence might be, it does not
warrant
murdering a suspect who could, it seems, have been easily
apprehended
and brought to trial. Much the same is true of evidence provided
since. Thus, the 9/11 Commission provided extensive
circumstantial
evidence of bin Laden’s role in 9/11, based primarily on what it
had been told about confessions by prisoners in Guantanamo. It
is
doubtful that much of that would hold up in an independent
court,
considering the ways confessions were elicited. But in any
event, the
conclusions of a congressionally authorised investigation,
however
convincing one finds them, plainly fall short of a sentence by a
credible court, which is what shifts the category of the accused
from
suspect to convicted.</font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><font
style="font-size: 8pt" size="1"><b>Crimes
of Aggression</b></font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><font
style="font-size: 8pt" size="1">It
might be instructive to ask ourselves how we would be reacting
if
Iraqi commandos had landed at George W Bush's compound,
assassinated
him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic (after proper burial
rites,
of course). Uncontroversially, he was not a “suspect” but the
“decider” who gave the orders to invade Iraq - that is, to
commit
the “supreme international crime differing only from other war
crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of
the
whole” for which Nazi criminals were hanged: the hundreds of
thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, destruction of much
of the
country and its national heritage, and the murderous sectarian
conflict that has now spread to the rest of the region. Equally
uncontroversially, these crimes vastly exceed anything
attributed to
bin Laden.</font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><font
style="font-size: 8pt" size="1">To
say that all of this is uncontroversial, as it is, is not to
imply
that it is not denied. The existence of flat earthers does not
change
the fact that, uncontroversially, the earth is not flat.
Similarly,
it is uncontroversial that Stalin and Hitler were responsible
for
horrendous crimes, though loyalists deny it. All of this should,
again, be too obvious for comment, and would be, except in an
atmosphere of hysteria so extreme that it blocks rational
thought.</font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><font
style="font-size: 8pt" size="1">Similarly,
it is uncontroversial that Bush and associates did commit the
“supreme international crime” - the crime of aggression. That
crime was defined clearly enough by Justice Robert Jackson,
Chief of
Counsel for the United States at Nuremberg. An “aggressor,”
Jackson proposed to the Tribunal in his opening statement, is a
state
that is the first to commit such actions as “[i]nvasion of its
armed forces, with or without a declaration of war, of the
territory
of another State ...” No one, even the most extreme supporter of
the aggression, denies that Bush and associates did just that.</font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><font
style="font-size: 8pt" size="1">We
might also do well to recall Jackson’s eloquent words at
Nuremberg
on the principle of universality: “If certain acts in violation
of
treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States
does
them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to
lay
down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would
not be
willing to have invoked against us.”</font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><font
style="font-size: 8pt" size="1">We
are left with two choices: either Bush and associates are guilty
of
the “supreme international crime” including all the evils that
follow, or else we declare that the Nuremberg proceedings were a
farce and the allies were guilty of judicial murder.</font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><font
style="font-size: 8pt" size="1"><b>The
Imperial Mentality and 9/11</b></font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><font
style="font-size: 8pt" size="1">It
is also worth thinking about the name given to the bin Laden
operation: Operation Geronimo. The imperial mentality is so
profound
that few seem able to perceive that the White House is
glorifying bin
Laden by calling him “Geronimo” - the Apache Indian chief who
led
the courageous resistance to the invaders of Apache lands. </font>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><font
style="font-size: 8pt" size="1">The
casual choice of the name is reminiscent of the ease with which
we
name our murder weapons after victims of our crimes: Apache,
Blackhawk … We might react differently if the Luftwaffe had
called
its fighter planes “Jew” and “Gypsy”.</font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><font
style="font-size: 8pt" size="1">Perhaps
the assassination was perceived by the administration as an “act
of
vengeance,” as Robertson concludes. And perhaps the rejection of
the legal option of a trial reflects a difference between the
moral
culture of 1945 and today, as he suggests. Whatever the motive
was,
it could hardly have been security. As in the case of the
“supreme
international crime” in Iraq, the bin Laden assassination is
another illustration of the important fact that security is
often not
a high priority for state action, contrary to received doctrine.</font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><font
style="font-size: 8pt" size="1">--Noam
Chomsky</font></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="JUSTIFY"><font
style="font-size: 8pt" size="1"><i>Noam
Chomsky is Institute Professor emeritus in the MIT Department
of
Linguistics and Philosophy. He is the author of numerous
bestselling
political works, including <b>9-11: Was There an Alternative?</b>
(Seven Stories Press), an updated version of his classic
account,
just being published this week with a major new essay - from
which
this post was adapted - considering the 10 years since the
9/11
attacks.</i></font></p>
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