[Peace-discuss] 9/11 - was there an alternative?

[C. G. Estabrook]

9/11 - was there an alternative response?
Suppression of one's own crimes is virtually ubiquitous among powerful states, 
at least those that are not defeated.
Noam Chomsky Last Modified: 07 Sep 2011 15:13

[On another 9/11 - September 11, 1973 - the CIA launched a coup that overthrew 
democratically-elected Chilean president Salvador Allende and replaced him with 
a military dictatorship - GALLO/GETTY]

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.

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.

That Washington was bent on fulfilling bin Laden’s fervent wishes was evident at 
once. As discussed in my book 9-11, written shortly after those attacks 
occurred, anyone with knowledge of the region could recognise “that a massive 
assault on a Muslim population would be the answer to the prayers of bin Laden 
and his associates, and would lead the US and its allies into a ‘diabolical 
trap’, as the French foreign minister put it”.

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.

The first 9/11

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.

In 9-11, I quoted Robert Fisk’s conclusion 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.

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”.

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.

These events of little consequence were not limited to the military coup that 
destroyed Chilean democracy and set in motion the horror story that followed. 
The first 9/11 was just one act in a drama which began in 1962, when John F 
Kennedy shifted the mission of the Latin American military from “hemispheric 
defense” - an anachronistic holdover from World War II - to “internal security”, 
a concept with a chilling interpretation in US-dominated Latin American circles.

In the recently published Cambridge University History of the Cold War, 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.

The consequences of this hemispheric plague still, of course, reverberate.

 From kidnapping and torture to assassination

All of this, and much more like it, is dismissed as of little consequence, and 
forgotten. Those whose mission is to rule the world enjoy a more comforting 
picture, articulated well enough in the current issue of the prestigious (and 
valuable) journal of the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London. The 
lead article discusses “the visionary international order” of the “second half 
of the twentieth century” marked by “the universalisation of an American vision 
of commercial prosperity”. There is something to that account, but it does not 
quite convey the perception of those at the wrong end of the guns.

The same is true of the assassination of Osama bin Laden, which brings to an end 
at least a phase in the “war on terror” re-declared by President George W Bush 
on the second 9/11. Let us turn to a few thoughts on that event and its 
significance.

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.

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.

A plausible reconstruction of the events is provided by veteran Middle East 
correspondent Yochi Dreazen and colleagues in the Atlantic. Dreazen, formerly 
the military correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, is senior correspondent 
for the National Journal Group covering military affairs and national security. 
According to their investigation, White House planning appears not to have 
considered the option of capturing bin Laden alive: “The administration had made 
clear to the military's clandestine Joint Special Operations Command that it 
wanted bin Laden dead, according to a senior US official with knowledge of the 
discussions. A high-ranking military officer briefed on the assault said the 
SEALs knew their mission was not to take him alive.”

The authors add: “For many at the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency 
who had spent nearly a decade hunting bin Laden, killing the militant was a 
necessary and justified act of vengeance.” Furthermore, “capturing bin Laden 
alive would have also presented the administration with an array of nettlesome 
legal and political challenges”. Better, then, to assassinate him, dumping his 
body into the sea without the autopsy considered essential after a killing - an 
act that predictably provoked both anger and skepticism in much of the Muslim world.

As the Atlantic inquiry observes, “The decision to kill bin Laden outright was 
the clearest illustration to date of a little-noticed aspect of the Obama 
administration's counterterror policy. The Bush administration captured 
thousands of suspected militants and sent them to detention camps in 
Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantanamo Bay. The Obama administration, by contrast, 
has focused on eliminating individual terrorists rather than attempting to take 
them alive.” That is one significant difference between Bush and Obama. The 
authors quote former West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, who “told German TV 
that the US raid was ‘quite clearly a violation of international law’ and that 
bin Laden should have been detained and put on trial”, contrasting Schmidt with 
US Attorney General Eric Holder, who “defended the decision to kill bin Laden 
although he didn't pose an immediate threat to the Navy SEALs, telling a House 
panel ... that the assault had been ‘lawful, legitimate and appropriate in every 
way’".

The disposal of the body without autopsy was also criticised by allies. 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.”

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.’”
Eric Margolis comments that “Washington has never made public the evidence of 
its claim that Osama bin Laden was behind the 9/11 attacks”, presumably one 
reason why “polls show that fully a third of American respondents believe that 
the US government and/or Israel were behind 9/11”, while in the Muslim world 
skepticism is much higher. “An open trial in the US or at the Hague would have 
exposed these claims to the light of day,” he continues, a practical reason why 
Washington should have followed the law.

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”.

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”.

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.

There is much talk of bin Laden's “confession”, but that was a boast, not a 
confession, with as much credibility as my “confession” that I won the Boston 
marathon. The boast tells us a lot about his character, but nothing about his 
responsibility for what he regarded as a great achievement, for which he wanted 
to take credit.

Again, all of this is, transparently, quite independent of one’s judgments about 
his responsibility, which seemed clear immediately, even before the FBI inquiry, 
and still does.

Crimes of aggression

It is worth adding that bin Laden’s responsibility was recognised in much of the 
Muslim world, and condemned. One significant example is the distinguished 
Lebanese cleric Sheikh Fadlallah, greatly respected by Hizbollah and Shia groups 
generally, outside Lebanon as well. He had some experience with assassinations. 
He had been targeted for assassination: by a truck bomb outside a mosque, in a 
CIA-organised operation in 1985. He escaped, but 80 others were killed, mostly 
women and girls as they left the mosque - one of those innumerable crimes that 
do not enter the annals of terror because of the fallacy of “wrong agency”. 
Sheikh Fadlallah sharply condemned the 9/11 attacks.

One of the leading specialists on the Jihadi movement, Fawaz Gerges, suggests 
that the movement might have been split at that time had the US exploited the 
opportunity instead of mobilising the movement, particularly by the attack on 
Iraq, a great boon to bin Laden, which led to a sharp increase in terror, as 
intelligence agencies had anticipated. At the Chilcot hearings investigating the 
background to the invasion of Iraq, for example, the former head of Britain’s 
domestic intelligence agency MI5 testified that both British and US intelligence 
were aware that Saddam posed no serious threat, that the invasion was likely to 
increase terror, and that the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan had radicalised 
parts of a generation of Muslims who saw the military actions as an “attack on 
Islam”. As is often the case, security was not a high priority for state action.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

It is also clear that announced intentions are irrelevant, even if they are 
truly believed. Internal records reveal that Japanese fascists apparently did 
believe that, by ravaging China, they were labouring to turn it into an “earthly 
paradise”. And although it may be difficult to imagine, it is conceivable that 
Bush and company believed they were protecting the world from destruction by 
Saddam’s nuclear weapons. All irrelevant, though ardent loyalists on all sides 
may try to convince themselves otherwise.

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.

The imperial mentality and 9/11

A few days before the bin Laden assassination, Orlando Bosch died peacefully in 
Florida, where he resided along with his accomplice Luis Posada Carriles and 
many other associates in international terrorism. After he was accused of dozens 
of terrorist crimes by the FBI, Bosch was granted a presidential pardon by Bush 
I over the objections of the Justice Department, which found the conclusion 
“inescapable that it would be prejudicial to the public interest for the United 
States to provide a safe haven for Bosch”. The coincidence of these deaths at 
once calls to mind the Bush II doctrine - “already … a de facto rule of 
international relations”, according to the noted Harvard international relations 
specialist Graham Allison - which revokes “the sovereignty of states that 
provide sanctuary to terrorists”.

Allison refers to the pronouncement of Bush II, directed at the Taliban, that 
“those who harbour terrorists are as guilty as the terrorists themselves”. Such 
states, therefore, have lost their sovereignty and are fit targets for bombing 
and terror - for example, the state that harbored Bosch and his associate. When 
Bush issued this new “de facto rule of international relations”, no one seemed 
to notice that he was calling for invasion and destruction of the US and the 
murder of its criminal presidents.

None of this is problematic, of course, if we reject Justice Jackson’s principle 
of universality, and adopt instead the principle that the US is self-immunised 
against international law and conventions - as, in fact, the government has 
frequently made very clear.

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.

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”.

The examples mentioned would fall under the category of “American 
exceptionalism”, were it not for the fact that easy suppression of one’s own 
crimes is virtually ubiquitous among powerful states, at least those that are 
not defeated and forced to acknowledge reality.

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.

[Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor emeritus in the MIT Department of 
Linguistics and Philosophy. He is the author of numerous bestselling political 
works, including 9-11: Was There an Alternative? (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.

A version of this piece was originally published on TomDispatch.com.]

http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/09/20119775453842191.html