[Peace-discuss] Farmers' market flyer #3

[C. G. Estabrook]

_*9/11 - Was There an Alternative?*_


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.


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.


[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.


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.


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 Torure to Assassination*


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.


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.'"


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.


*Crimes of Aggression*


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."


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*


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".


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


/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./

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