As U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar on Friday led condemnation of a reported Biden administration plan to permanently seize $7 billion of currently frozen Afghan assets and distribute half to relatives of 9/11 victims, advocates pointed to the worsening humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan and urged President Joe Biden to change course.
Noting that “there wasn’t a single Afghan” among the 9/11 hijackers — and the U.S. gives billions of dollars to the Saudi and Egyptian governments despite their “direct ties to the 9/11 terrorists” — Omar (D-Minn.) tweeted that punishing millions of starving people is “unconscionable.”
Omar said she agrees with Barry Amundson — a member of 9/11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows who lost his brother in the Pentagon attack — who warned the proposed seizure would “cause further harm to innocent Afghans.”
Agree with Barry Amundson, whose brother was killed in the tragic 9/11 terror attack: "I fear that the end result of seizing this money will be to cause further harm to innocent Afghans who have already suffered greatly."
Khaled Beydoun, an Egyptian-American scholar, tweeted: “This is theft. Graft. Amid famine, no less.”
“Newsflash: Zero of the 9/11 terrorists were Afghan,” he added. “This is absurd.”
The advocacy group Afghans for A Better Tomorrow said in a statement that the proposed redistribution of Afghan funds “is short-sighted, cruel, and will worsen a catastrophe in progress, affecting millions of Afghans, many of whom are on the verge of starvation.”
“Taking money which rightfully belongs to the Afghan people will not bring justice but ensure more misery and death in Afghanistan,” the group — which is circulating a petition aimed at convincing the administration to immediately unfreeze some of the funds — asserted.
Currently, in Afghanistan, 23 million Afghans are on the brink of starvation.
One million Afghan children could die this winter.
— Afghans For A Better Tomorrow (@AfghansTomorrow) January 10, 2022
Phyllis Rodriguez, whose son died in the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center in New York City and who is also with Peaceful Tomorrows, was among those urging Biden to reject the proposed policy.
“President Biden has the opportunity to make amends right now! He can unfreeze the funds belonging to the Afghan people,” she said. “They are not the Taliban’s property but of everyday folks like us. Let’s see this as a humanitarian crisis that we can address immediately.”
Others noted the dire conditions the Afghan people are currently enduring.
After 20 years of investments to build up an Afghan Central Bank modeled after the Federal Reserve, the US is trying to kill it. So much for all that talk about the importance of institutions. Why would anyone trust us anymore. What country's monies are we going to seize next?
Masuda Sultan, an Afghan-American author and activist with Unfreeze Afghanistan, said that Afghans are “experiencing a historic famine within a pandemic, and their economy has been in a freefall worse than the Great Depression.”
“One of the main drivers of the economic collapse is the freezing of their assets,” she added. “If the funds are not returned and the famine is not averted, America will be blamed for one of the worst famines in history.”
Rodriguez said that “it saddens me that there are 9/11 family members who can’t see the discrepancies in our relative privilege to demand reparations instead of recognizing the dire need of Afghans.”
“They have suffered unjustly for the actions of a cadre of extremists — a tiny minority of the population,” she continued. “Major famine, disease, displacement, and destruction that our government and its allies created should be reversed through all means possible.”
Medea Benjamin, co-founder of the women-led peace group CodePink, said in a statement that “taking funds that rightfully belong to some of the poorest people in the world who are now facing a catastrophic famine is a cruel move that will not bring justice to the 9/11 families.”
Referencing the U.S. occupation that Biden ended last year as the Taliban retook the country, Benjamin tweeted that taking “billions of dollars away from starving Afghans” would be “a fitting end to 20 years of screwing the Afghan people.”
As Democrats in Congress struggle to pass the $1.75 trillion Build Back Better Act, there is large bipartisan consensus in the U.S. Congress to spend over $7 trillion over the next 10 years in military spending. The United States spends more each year on defense than China, Russia, India, the U.K., Germany, France, Japan, South Korea, and Australia combined. “Democrats have to engage in theater about human rights and international law and due process, but they ultimately, at the end of the day, are just as aggressive as Republicans,” says investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill of The Intercept. His most recent piece is titled, “The War Party: From Bush to Obama, and Trump to Biden, U.S. Militarism Is the Great Unifier.” We also speak with Scahill about the Biden administration’s ongoing persecution of military whistleblowers, including Daniel Hale.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMYGOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, Democracynow.org, the War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman with Juan González. The United States is on pace to spend over $7 trillion over the next ten years for the Pentagon. To put that number in perspective, the U.S. spends more each year on the military than China, Russia, India, the U.K., Germany, France, Japan, South Korea and Australia combined.
While Republicans and Democrats are in sharp disagreements over the much smaller Build Back Better legislation, there is largely a bipartisan consensus when it comes to the military budget and foreign military intervention. We end today’s show with investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill of The Intercept. His latest article is headlined The War Party: From Bush to Obama, and Trump to Biden, U.S. Militarism Is the Great Unifier.
Welcome to Democracy Now! Welcome back, Jeremy, former producer at Democracy Now! Why don’t you lay out your thesis?
JEREMYSCAHILL: Oh the anniversary of 9/11, I was being asked to write pieces and to make media appearances because of the work that I had done throughout the War on Terror that culminated with the film and book Dirty Wars where I was investigating the CIA and the Joint Special Operations Command and this expanding drone program and how the United States under Barack Obama in particular had moved toward a radical attempt to normalize and legitimize assassination as a central component of American national security policy. Of course, you and Juan know well that the U.S. has long engaged in assassination and political assassination but presidents have found a way around actually owning the fact that they were authorizing assassination. Under Obama, the term du jour was “targeted killing.” Now under Joe Biden we see them increasingly use the phrase “over-the-horizon operations.”
I hesitated to write anything on the 9/11 anniversary because I sort of came to the conclusion that we obsess far too much about the way in which 9/11 impacted the world. It is indisputable that the U.S. response to the 9/11 attacks altered geopolitical realities in the world and certainly altered the future of countries like Iraq and Afghanistan and the broader Middle East. But ultimately, I concluded that there is a sort of an inherent intellectual dishonesty to pretending that the United States was not already on this trajectory prior to 9/11.
So what I am trying to do in this piece is just establish some basic facts that we can use as a basis for discussing the U.S. role in the world, and that is that prior to 9/11, the U.S. was already on a course to do regime change in Iraq. In 1998, the bipartisan Iraq Liberation Act was passed that codified regime change as the official policy of the United States government. It was largely the product of the work of the neoconservative Project for the New American Century. But even then-Congressman Bernie Sanders voted in favor of making regime change the law of the land in the United States.
Bill Clinton had already moved toward small wars, as they say, and using remote lethal strikes, although there were not really using weaponized drones under Clinton. They were being developed, but they didn’t use them. They were using more legacy systems like cruise missiles to attack Afghanistan under Clinton, Iraq on an average of almost once every three days under Bill Clinton. Of course, the first attempt to kill or assassinate Osama bin Laden that we are aware of happened under Bill Clinton. So you had a foreign policy that was already moving toward a very radical embrace of this notion that the U.S. has the sovereign right to bomb any country anywhere regardless of what the U.S. Congress had to say about it. In fact Joe Biden as a senator in the late 1990s was the chief congressional architect of Bill Clinton’s 78-day bombing campaign of then-Yugoslavia, which was done by Clinton over the explicit objection of the U.S. Congress.
So on 9/11, you have these neocons come to power, the Bush-Cheney administration, with real veterans of Washington. They knew how to move the levers of power. They also knew how to exploit the fear, the anger of the American people at the 9/11 attacks. What we saw, Amy, was the Democratic Party just fall in line behind the Bush administration at every turn. Throughout the eight years of Bush-Cheney, the Democrats would raise holy hell about certain war issues and the Iraq War, but when it actually mattered, when it was the Patriot Act, when it was the authorization for the use of military force, when it was the Iraq War, the kingpins and queenpins of the Democratic Party aided and abetted a militant neocon agenda.
We could talk a lot about Barack Obama but in short, Barack Obama, when he campaigned in 2008 against Hillary Clinton in the primary and then against the notorious militarist John McCain in the general election, one of the main reasons why his campaign caught such fire was this notion that he represented something different than the bipartisan war party. Of course what ended up happening when Obama comes into power is he lets the CIA off the hook, he lets Donald Rumsfeld and the other torture architects off the hook and then he radically expends some of the worst aspects of the so-called War on Terror and uses his credibility as a constitutional law scholar, as the first Black president, as a sort of guy that was perceived as being a different kind of politician to push the U.S. imperial agenda on a militarist level beyond what a John McCain would have done, because he got the Democratic Party to support it.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Are there any discernible differences that you can tell in the approaches to this imperial policy of the United States between the recent Democratic presidents—we are talking about obviously Clinton, Obama and Biden—and the Republican ones, the two Bushes and Trump? Are there any different approaches from them in terms of imperial rule?
JEREMYSCAHILL: Yeah. Let’s start with what I think is the most obvious issue that I think you could say it’s a good thing that Joe Biden did this, and that is the withdrawal from Afghanistan. Certainly, there are serious questions about the tactical withdrawal and the bloodshed that was witnessed and the scene at the Kabul Airport. Congress is going to spend endless time looking at that span of a few days. In fact, I will predict they are going to spend more time looking at Biden’s withdrawal than they are going to spend looking at the catastrophic 20-year policy in Afghanistan.
There was an enormous amount of pressure on Joe Biden to keep the war in Afghanistan going from within his own party, certainly from the military brass. I think Biden deserves credit for standing up to them. I am not sure that if Barack Obama had been the commander-in-chief during this period he actually would have followed through as Biden did on a total withdrawal of conventional American forces. I do think someone who is this career politician specializing in foreign policy, I think Joe Biden knew the history well enough to know that he would have been taking a catastrophic gamble by keeping U.S. troops in Afghanistan. I think outside of Bernie Sanders, I think there were almost no Democratic candidates that would have had the spine to follow through on Trump’s withdrawal plan.
Regarding China, I think it is a bit of a wash because you have both the Democrats and Republicans taking an increasingly hostile posture. When you have someone like Trump engaging in the rhetoric that he engaged in, I think some world leaders can sort of recognize that this guy is a bit of a lunatic. But when you have Biden and his Secretary of State Tony Blinken staking out very radical position on Taiwan and then saber-rattling and doing military exercises, it takes on a different level. I think the Democrats have to engage in kind of theater about human rights and international law and due process but they ultimately at the end of the day are just as aggressive as Republicans albeit with some tweaking of the machinery.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Given all of this emphasis now in the early days of the Biden administration on the threats from China, but even now in terms of Russia and Ukraine, the Soviet Union collapsed more than two decades ago and China, despite its socialist veneer, has become the manufacturing linchpin of world capitalism. Isn’t this renewed fear-mongering on the supposed threat from China and Russia simply a way to justify greater, as you say, government expenditures on the military complex, which then privatizes this stuff for the consumer market? I’m thinking, for instance, of drones. Drones are now becoming a major consumer market when it started out as a military tool.
JEREMYSCAHILL: Oh, absolutely. And I think if you look at the recent comments of Xi Jinping, particularly after his virtual summit with Joe Biden, he has been really hitting the talking point that what is happening is that the United States is taking this neo-Cold War posture. I think he is entirely right. But I sort of see it in the same vein as you. China, the United States and Russia in particular are engaged in a classic capitalist battle for control of natural resources all throughout the world. Look at what is happening on the African continent. You have China engaging in large-scale construction projects. You are also starting to see Chinese manufactured drones popping up in a variety of conflicts. You have the United States essentially agitating to bring down the Ethiopian government albeit through sort of quieter diplomatic or back channels. But the United States and China and Russia are engaged in a very serious strategic battle over control of natural resources in a variety of regions around the world.
What I think is happening as a result of NATO expansion, of Biden being a tremendously hawkish figure on Ukraine and basically daring Vladimir Putin to stand up to NATO expansion, is that you run the risk of what is ultimately the elite business class of the world having their battles spilling over into overt military conflict. I think China in particular is very concerned about the aggressive U.S. stance because I think China would be very happy to find a way to just sort of divvy up the world for domination in various regions. The United States is not going to accept that. The U.S. posture is pushing China and Russia into an even closer alliance akin to the relationship during the Cold War.
AMYGOODMAN: We are talking to Jeremy Scahill and I just want to note that Jeremy is sitting in front of perhaps the most famous antiwar painting ever, antiwar, anti-fascist painting, and that is Pablo Picasso’s Guernica the destruction of a Spanish town, city, Guernica, by the German and Italian fascist forces in support of the fascist Spanish general, Franco. Although Picasso was Spanish, he lived in Paris and said his painting could never go back to Spain while Franco was still in power. But that’s not what I want to ask you about, Jeremy. I wanted to ask you about that other piece you wrote headlined U.S. Absolves Drone Killers and Persecutes Whistleblowers. Can you talk about the last drone strike that we know of in Afghanistan during the U.S. withdrawal and what whistleblowers have to do with that?
JEREMYSCAHILL: Joe Biden made clear when he announced his withdrawal from Afghanistan that the United States was going to still have the capability to strike remotely. It is a harrowing grotesque flashback to many of the incidents we saw during the Obama era where the Biden administration authorized a drone strike on what they claimed was a vehicle carrying ISIS operatives. And you just recently had this terrorist attack at the Kabul Airport during the withdrawal. On the surveillance feed that the drone operators were looking at, we now know that they saw clearly at least one child and still went forward with the strike. Seven of the ten people killed in that strike were children. Ten of the ten people were civilians.
Now the person who has been convicted of leaking top-secret documents and secret documents on the drone program, Daniel Hale, who is serving almost four years and is now in a Kafkaesque communications management unit in federal prison, one of the revelations that Daniel Hale was convicted of making that was published by The Intercept stated that at a certain period of time, U.S. so-called targeted killing operations in Afghanistan, as many as nine of ten people killed in the strikes were not the intended target. We do not know who they necessarily were. They could have entirely been innocent civilians or they could have just been people the United States didn’t know, but that the United States would preemptively categorize them as enemies killed in action. That was initially what happened in this strike as well except ten of ten were civilians. The one name that everyone knows is the individual who worked for a U.S. aid organization was one of the people killed in this strike.
What happened after that is that the Pentagon did its own investigation of itself and exonerated itself of any crimes. This is the bipartisan self-exoneration machine that has long fueled U.S. military operations around the world. Joe Biden was part of the Obama administration, of course, which operated as a global octopus with lethal tentacles that could strike anywhere. Daniel Hale should be freed. He is an American hero for revealing what we now see continuing under Joe Biden.
Tune into Democracy Now! on Thursday when we mark our 25th anniversary with an hour-long special looking at show highlights over the past quarter of a century. And on Friday, we speak to Mansoor Adayfi who was imprisoned at Guantánamo for more than a decade. I’m Amy Goodman with Juan González. Thanks so much for joining us.
Edward Curtin returns to discuss deep politics and what links the assassination of JFK, 9/11, and Covid-19. No president since Kennedy has dared to buck the Military-Industrial-Complex, including Trump, who is part of the same system that produced both Obama and Biden. He discusses the 1967 CIA memo which told mainstream media to use the disparaging term “conspiracy theory” to quell all deviation from the official narrative, and how this propaganda technique has continued to function from JFK to 9/11 to Covid-19. Many of the same actors involved in the MIC and 9/11 continue to be involved with the drug companies, CDC, WEF, WHO, Gates Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation. It’s very obvious, but the story is so frightening people don’t want to do any homework. Too many people think there is this war going on between the right and the left, in the larger frame of reference there is no difference, it’s the warfare state against the regular people, the rich versus the poor. The 4IR is an effort for total political and economic control of peoples all over the world. He believes the purpose of the vaccine mandate is for political control. Ultimately, we are in a spiritual war.
[Editor’s Note: To mark the 20th anniversary of the rise of the American security state after the September 11th attacks, The Dissenter continues a retrospective on this transformation in policing and government.]
Mark Klein worked for over twenty years as a technician for the AT&T Corporation. He blew the whistle on the AT&T’s collaboration with the National Security Agency, which allowed for warrantless wiretapping of phone and internet communications.
In 2006, Klein came to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) with documents of AT&T’s involvement in the United States’ domestic spying program. His whistleblowing became the basis of the organization’s lawsuit against the NSA.
According to Kevin Bankston [PDF], who was an EFF staff attorney, Klein described the “technology behind AT&T’s participation in the program, whereby the NSA had been given complete access to the Internet traffic transiting through at least one, and probably more, AT&T Internet facilities.”
“A secret, NSA-controlled room in an AT&T office” was constructed and splitters copied light signals that were transferred across fiber-optic cables in order to give the government access to AT&T customers’ private data.
The Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001, or the PATRIOT Act, helped to create a security climate that encouraged this kind of public-private partnership between AT&T and the NSA.
It was signed into law by President George W. Bush on October 26, 2001. However, versions of the legislation, which gave the government expanded authority to engage in mass surveillance and data collection, including against American citizens, were passed earlier in October.
Only a few members of Congress raised the kind of objections which contemplated the types of abuses, which Klein and other whistleblowers exposed.
Debated In The ‘Most Undemocratic Way Possible,’ Opposed By Only One Senator
The PATRIOT Act was developed in 45 days. Several representatives admitted they had not read the bill. Open debate was largely forbidden and amendments to the legislation were discouraged.
Only one U.S. senator voted against the bill—Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin.
Feingold nobly attempted on October 11 to amend the PATRIOT Act to remove some of its worst elements. He tried to amend it so an anti-hacking provision was narrowed. He believed it could “allow universities, libraries, and employers to permit government surveillance of people who are permitted to use the computer facilities of those entities. Such surveillance would take place without a judicial order or probable cause to believe that a crime is being committed.”
A second amendment offered urged senators to a safeguard in the “roving wiretap authority” section of the bill. Feingold believed an order in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act should have been required to “ascertain that the target of the surveillance [was] actually in the house that [was] bugged, or using the phone that [was] tapped.”
Yet another amendment involved section 215, which stated all business records could be compelled for production by the FBI, including medical records from a hospital or doctor, educational records, or records of books a person checked out from a library. Feingold tried to make sure this provision did not become “the platform or an excuse for a fishing expedition for damaging information on American citizens who are not the subjects of FISA surveillance.”
Feingold tried to warn senators of what would happen if terrorists were rewarded by the United States weakening freedoms. He also cautioned against the “mistreatment of Arab Americans, Muslim Americans, South Asians, or others” in the United States. “Already, one day after the attacks, we were hearing news reports that misguided anger against people of these backgrounds had led to harassment, violence, and even death.”
“Our national consciousness still bears the stain and the scars of those events: the Alien and Sedition Acts, the suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War, the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II and the injustices perpetrated against German Americans and Italian-Americans, the blacklisting of supposed communist sympathizers during the McCarthy era, and the surveillance and harassment of antiwar protesters, including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., during the Vietnam War.
“We must not allow this piece of our past to become prologue,” Feingold declared.
But the Senate did not heed his words of caution. All three of the amendments were defeated. In fact, Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, a Democrat from South Dakota, opposed the amendments on procedural grounds, claiming there was no time to delay passage of the PATRIOT Act.
In the House of Representatives, a small number of representatives objected.
Representative Bobby Scott contended the legislation was not “limited to terrorism.” It reduced standards for foreign intelligence wiretapping, allowed for a roving wiretap, and the ability to use information from a roving wiretap in a criminal investigation. This would allow the government to “conduct a criminal investigation without probable cause.”
Both Scott and Representative Sheila Jackson-Lee were concerned about provisions that could be used to permit the indefinite detention of Americans. Scott was bothered by the parts of the bill that would permit secret searches referred to as “sneak-and-peak.”
Representative Tom Udall protested the fact that members were not allowed to offer amendments. “At no point in the debate in this very profound set of issues have we had a procedure whereby the most democratic institution in our government, the House of Representatives, engages in democracy.”
“This bill, ironically, which has been given all of these high-flying acronyms, it is the PATRIOT bill, it is the U.S.A. bill, it is the stand up and sing the Star-Spangled Banner bill, has been debated in the most undemocratic way possible, and it is not worthy of this institution,” Udall added.
While Congress granted U.S. security agencies enormously expanded power, the FBI detained and questioned hundreds of Arabs, Muslims, or South Asians about the 9/11 attacks. They were held for months and not charged with any crimes. Under the pretext of “immigration violations,” Attorney General Ashcroft kept them in squalid jail conditions and then deported most of them.
Thomas Tamm, who was an attorney for the U.S. Justice Department (Screen shot from PBS FRONTLINE and fair use as it is included for the purpose of news commentary)
Exposing Warrantless Wiretapping By The Bush Administration
As journalist Michael Isikoff reported for Newsweek, Thomas Tamm, an attorney at the Justice Department, “stumbled upon the existence of a highly classified National Security Agency program” that involved spying on citizens. Special rules for the unit enabled the section to hide NSA activities from judges on the FISA court. (It was often referred to as “The Program.”)
Tamm contacted the New York Times and became a source for the Eric Lichtblau and James Risen report published in 2006, which revealed that Bush secretly authorized the NSA to engage in warrantless wiretapping through a program known as Stellar Wind.
“I asked a supervisor of mine if she knew what ‘The Program’ was about,” recalled Tamm during an interview for PBS FRONTLINE. “She told me that she just assumed that what we were doing was illegal and she didn’t want to ask any questions. That really ate away at me and bothered me, because I thought I had gone into law enforcement to enforce the law. I didn’t like the fact that I thought, or that a supervisor thought, that we might be doing something illegal.”
Tamm contacted someone with a top-secret security clearance on Capitol Hill, who he knew from working on a prior case. He asked her to find out what Congress knew and if representatives, especially those on the intelligence committees, understood what was being done. She did not really help him uncover any answers. He emailed and asked again for her assistance. When she said she could not help him, he said he would have to go the press.
“You know, Tom, whistleblowers frequently don’t end up very well,” Tamm’s contact replied.
At first, New York Times executive editor Bill Keller allowed the Bush White House to pressure the media organization into not publishing the story before Bush was re-elected in 2004. After Risen threatened to include it in his book, State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration, the Times moved to publish in December 2005 before Risen’s book was released.
In retaliation for exposing this “separate track” in the government for authorizing secret and illegal surveillance, the FBI raided Tamm’s home on August 1, 2007. His family endured a lot of hardship. He believed he could be indicted by the Justice Department at any moment and turned to Isikoff to get his story out on what he did and why he did it.
Tamm was granted immunity in April 2011 to testify before a grand jury investigating leaks published by Risen from the CIA. He testified on details that were not previously agreed upon, but since he was not ashamed of what he did, Tamm felt no reason to hold back. And once that was over, the Justice Department indicated there would be no charges.
‘All The Lawyers Have Approved It. It’s Legal’
NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake spoke over the phone in October 2001 with one of the top lawyers in the NSA. He was concerned that Stellar Wind or “The Program,” which gathered the phone calls and Internet communications of millions of Americans, was illegal.
When asked about this conversation by PBS FRONTLINE, that lawyer, Vito Potenza, pretended not to remember the phone call. He also indicated he would have ignored Drake’s concerns.
“Don’t bother me with this. I mean, you know, the minute he said, if he did say you’re using this to violate the Constitution, I mean, I probably would have stopped the conversation at that point quite frankly. So, I mean, if that’s what he said he said, then anything after that I probably wasn’t listening to anyway,” Potenza told PBS FRONTLINE.
Drake said he “confronted” Potenza “directly in the most direct language possible,” accusing the NSA of “violating the Constitution.” Potenza knew the truth and “chose to go with ‘The Program.’ And anybody questioning ‘The Program’ was a threat.”
Along with NSA whistleblowers Bill Binney, Ed Loomis, and Kirk Wiebe, Drake found that a program called ThinThread no longer had its privacy protections when collecting data. The automatic encryption of U.S. person-related data was suspended. Instead, an algorithm called Mainway linked phone numbers together as data was collected. The agency then went to telecommunications companies like AT&T and requested “bulk-copy records” of Americans.
This convinced Binney, Loomis, and Wiebe to leave the NSA, but Drake remained and attempted to blow the whistle through “proper channels.”
In September 2002, Binney, Wiebe, and Diane Roark, who worked for the House Intelligence Committee, filed a “confidential complaint” with the Office of the Inspector General for the Department of Defense. They complained about a “billion dollar boondoggle” called Trailblazer and how officials all the way up to NSA chief Michael Hayden violated regulations by going with this project instead of ThinThread.
It was a felony to engage in this kind of warrantless surveillance, but the names of these individuals who worked for NSA were passed along to the Justice Department for investigation.
After the New York Times finally published the story from Risen and Lichtblau exposing the Bush wiretapping scandal, the FBI targeted them. They had their homes raided. Drake was prosecuted under the Espionage Act.
During that phone call, Drake attempted to warn the the NSA’s top lawyer that what the NSA was doing after the 9/11 attacks was illegal.
“The hair literally was up on the back of my neck, because he proceeded to tell me: ‘You don’t understand. All the lawyers have approved it. It’s legal. The White House has authorized NSA to serve as the executive agent for ‘the Program.’”
Stumbling Across More Warrantless Surveillance By ‘Major Telecom’
In 2008, Congress deliberated over legislation known as the FISA Amendments Act that included retroactive immunity for telecommunications corporations like AT&T, which were vulnerable to lawsuits following revelations from whistleblowers like Mark Klein and Thomas Tamm.
Babak Pasdar, an information technology security expert, came forward [PDF] in February 2008 with evidence that indicated a “major telecommunications giant” likely gave a U.S. government entity “access to every communication coming through that company’s infrastructure, including every email, internet use, document transmission, video, and text message, as well as the ability to listen in on any phone call.”
Members of Congress, including John Dingell, the chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, wrote in a “Dear Colleague” letter, described the “Quantico Circuit” that Pasdar observed.
“In the course of his work, he discovered that an unidentified third party had been given unfettered and unsecured access to all of the data transmissions it carried,” the letter added. “When Mr. Pasdar identified this security breach and made suggestions about how to correct the situation, representatives of the carrier reportedly refused to secure the network. Moreover, they refused to implement tracking programs to identify what data were accessed.”
According to Pasdar, the access to the carrier’s data center infrastructure included the carrier’s fraud detection system. That was not benign to him. The fraud detection system had the ability to “track all mobile devices by geography.”
Pasdar’s allegations echoed those from Klein, but one key issue for members of Congress was that the telecommunications companies that participated in wiretapping without any court orders or warrants were prohibited from talking to Congress. President George W. Bush would not let them.
Unfortunately, the whistleblowing of Klein and Pasdar was disregarded by Congress. The FISA Amendments Act, as the ACLU put it, legalized “mass, untargeted, and unwarranted spying” on international phone calls and emails. It restricted judicial oversight of surveillance by the FISA court and granted companies like AT&T retroactive immunity.
Senator Barack Obama made it clear during his presidential campaign that he would “support a filibuster of any bill that [included] retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies.” When it came time, he declined to filibuster, and he voted for the FISA Amendments Act, which passed 69-28 in the Senate.
First interview NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden did where he revealed he was behind the revelations around mass surveillance programs (Screen shot from Guardian and included for purposes of news commentary)
Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden made the decision to become a whistleblower after he came across a classified 2009 inspector general’s report on the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program developed under Bush.
“You can’t read something like that and not realize what it means for all of these systems we have,” Snowden declared in an interview with Risen in 2013. “If the highest officials in government can break the law without fearing punishment or even any repercussions at all, secret powers become tremendously dangerous.”
In 2013, Snowden provided numerous documents to journalists Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras that exposed NSA mass surveillance programs, especially those established after the 9/11 attacks, to unprecedented scrutiny.
The first major revelation from Snowden concerned a document that showed the NSA was collecting the phone records of millions of Verizon customers daily under section 215 of the PATRIOT Act. In 2015, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals determined [PDF] the collection was illegal and outside the scope of what Congress authorized.
Further revelations included (but were not limited to): a program called PRISM, which involved real-time collection of communications from companies like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Skype, etc; the collection of email and chat contact lists from millions of people around the world; a “Dishfire” program that collected 200 million text messages per day that the NSA could use to mine contact information, location data, and credit card details; an NSA “loophole” that allowed agents to search U.S. citizens’ emails and phone calls without a warrant; and the targeting of messaging apps like Signal or WhatsApp or encryption tools like Tor.
What Snowden disclosed about surveillance, which was justified by the passage of the PATRIOT Act, showed U.S. security agencies were collecting all the data they could vacuum and copy on to their servers. It prompted a serious but rare conversation among lawmakers and the media about the powers the NSA abuses and the legal authorities the government claimed, which were never granted. Quite a number of programs that officials could not publicly defend were paused or discontinued.
Even a Drug Enforcement Administration program called USTO that harvested the records of billions of American’s international phone calls for more than two decades was ended by the Justice Department in September 2013 because of Snowden’s whistleblowing.
As the New York Times wrote in an editorial in January 2014, “Snowden told The Washington Post earlier this month that he did report his misgivings to two superiors at the agency, showing them the volume of data collected by the NSA, and that they took no action. (The NSA. says there is no evidence of this.) That’s almost certainly because the agency and its leaders don’t consider these collection programs to be an abuse and would never have acted on Mr. Snowden’s concerns.
“Snowden was clearly justified in believing that the only way to blow the whistle on this kind of intelligence-gathering was to expose it to the public and let the resulting furor do the work his superiors would not.”
Despite the modest reforms embraced by lawmakers and the shift in public attitudes toward mass surveillance, Snowden continues to face charges under the Espionage Act and lives in exile under asylum in Russia.Obama reauthorized key provisions in the PATRIOT Act in 2012, but in 2020, the PATRIOT Act’s provisions mostly expired in 2020 when the House of Representatives failed to renew them.
The costs and consequences of America’s twenty-first-century wars have by now been well-documented — a staggering $8 trillion in expenditures and more than 380,000 civilian deaths, ascalculatedby Brown University’s Costs of War project. The question of who has benefited most from such an orgy of military spending has, unfortunately, received far less attention.
Corporations large and small have left the financial feast of that post-9/11 surge in military spending with genuinely staggering sums in hand. After all, Pentagon spending has totaled an almost unimaginable$14 trillion-plussince the start of the Afghan War in 2001, up toone-halfof which (catch a breath here) went directly to defense contractors.
“The Purse Is Now Open”: The Post-9/11 Flood of Military Contracts
The political climate created by the Global War on Terror, or GWOT, as Bush administration officials quicklydubbedit, set the stage for humongous increases in the Pentagon budget. In the first year after the 9/11 attacks and the invasion of Afghanistan, defense spendingroseby more than 10% and that was just the beginning. It would, in fact, increase annually for the next decade, which was unprecedented in American history. The Pentagon budgetpeakedin 2010 at the highest level since World War II — over $800 billion,substantially morethan the country spent on its forces at the height of the Korean or Vietnam Wars or during President Ronald Reagan’s vaunted military buildup of the 1980s.
And in the new political climate sparked by the reaction to the 9/11 attacks, those increases reached well beyond expenditures specifically tied to fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As Harry Stonecipher, then vice president of Boeing,toldtheWall Street Journalin an October 2001 interview, “The purse is now open… [A]ny member of Congress who doesn’t vote for the funds we need to defend this country will be looking for a new job after next November.”
Stonecipher’s prophesy of rapidly rising Pentagon budgets proved correct. And it’s never ended. The Biden administration is anything but an exception. Its latest proposal for spending on the Pentagon and related defense work like nuclear warhead development at the Department of Energy topped$753 billionfor FY2022. And not to be outdone, the House and Senate Armed Services Committees have already voted to add roughly$24 billionto that staggering sum.
Who Benefited?
The benefits of the post-9/11 surge in Pentagon spending have been distributed in a highly concentrated fashion. More thanone-thirdof all contracts now go to just five major weapons companies — Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman. Those five received more than$166 billionin such contracts in fiscal year 2020 alone. To put such a figure in perspective, the $75 billion in Pentagon contracts awarded to Lockheed Martin that year was significantly more than one and one-half times the entire 2020 budget for the State Department and the Agency for International Development, which together totaled$44 billion.
While it’s true that the biggest financial beneficiaries of the post-9/11 military spending surge were those five weapons contractors, they were anything but the only ones to cash in. Companies benefiting from the buildup of the past 20 years also included logistics and construction firms like Kellogg, Brown & Root (KBR) and Bechtel, as well as armed private security contractors like Blackwater and Dyncorp. The Congressional Research Service estimates that in FY2020 the spending for contractors of all kinds had grown to$420 billion, or well over half of the total Pentagon budget. Companies in all three categories noted above took advantage of “wartime” conditions — in which both speed of delivery and less rigorous oversight came to be considered the norms — to overcharge the government or even engage in outright fraud.
The best-known reconstruction and logistics contractor in Iraq and Afghanistan was Halliburton, through its KBR subsidiary. At the start of both the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Halliburton was therecipientof the Pentagon’s Logistics Civil Augmentation Program contracts. Those open-ended arrangements involved coordinating support functions for troops in the field, including setting up military bases, maintaining equipment, and providing food and laundry services. By 2008, the company had received more than$30 billionfor such work.
Halliburton’s role would prove controversial indeed, reeking as it did of self-dealing and blatant corruption. The notion ofprivatizingmilitary-support services was first initiated in the early 1990s by Dick Cheney when he was secretary of defense in the George H.W. Bush administration and Halliburtongot the contractto figure out how to do it. I suspect you won’t be surprised to learn that Cheney then went on toserveas the CEO of Halliburton until he became vice president under George W. Bush in 2001. His journey was a (if notthe) classic case of that revolving door between the Pentagon and the defense industry,now usedby so many government officials and generals or admirals, with all the obvious conflicts-of-interest it entails.
Once it secured its billions for work in Iraq, Halliburton proceeded to vastly overcharge the Pentagon for basic services, even while doingshoddy workthat put U.S. troops at risk — and it would prove to be anything but alone in such activities.
Starting in 2004, a year into the Iraq War, theSpecial Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, a congressionally mandated body designed to root out waste, fraud, and abuse, along with Congressionalwatchdogslike Representative Henry Waxman (D-CA), exposed scores of examples of overcharging, faulty construction, and outright theft by contractors engaged in the “rebuilding” of that country. Again, you undoubtedly won’t be surprised to find out that relatively few companies suffered significant financial or criminal consequences for what can only be described as striking war profiteering. The congressional Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan estimated that, as of 2011, waste, fraud, and abuse in the two war zones had alreadytotaled$31 billion to $60 billion.
A case in point was the International Oil Trading Company, whichreceivedcontracts worth $2.7 billion from the Pentagon’s Defense Logistics Agency to provide fuel for U.S. operations in Iraq. Aninvestigationby Congressman Waxman, chair of the House Government Oversight and Reform Committee, found that the firm had routinely overcharged the Pentagon for the fuel it shipped into Iraq, making more than $200 million in profits on oil sales of $1.4 billion during the period from 2004 to 2008. More than a third of those funds went to its owner, Harry Sargeant III, who also served as the finance chairman of the Florida Republican Party. Waxmansummarizedthe situation this way: “The documents show that Mr. Sargeant’s company took advantage of U.S. taxpayers. His company had the only license to transport fuel through Jordan, so he could get away with charging exorbitant prices. I’ve never seen another situation like this.”
A particularly egregious case of shoddy work with tragic human consequences involved the electrocution of at least 18 military personnel at several bases in Iraq from 2004 on. This happened thanks to faulty electrical installations, some done by KBR and its subcontractors. An investigation by the Pentagon’s Inspector Generalfoundthat commanders in the field had “failed to ensure that renovations… had been properly done, the Army did not set standards for jobs or contractors, and KBR did not ground electrical equipment it installed at the facility.”
The Afghan “reconstruction” process was similarly replete with examples of fraud, waste, and abuse. These included a U.S.-appointed economic task force that spent$43 millionconstructing a gas station essentially in the middle of nowhere that would never be used, another$150 millionon lavish living quarters for U.S. economic advisors, and$3 millionfor Afghan police patrol boats that would prove similarly useless.
Perhaps most disturbingly, a congressional investigationfoundthat a significant portion of $2 billion worth of transportation contracts issued to U.S. and Afghan firms ended up as kickbacks to warlords and police officials or as payments to the Taliban to allow large convoys of trucks to pass through areas they controlled, sometimes as much as $1,500 per truck, or up to half a million dollars for each 300-truck convoy. In 2009, Secretary of State Hillary Clintonstatedthat “one of the major sources of funding for the Taliban is the protection money” paid from just such transportation contracts.
A Two-Decade Explosion of Corporate Profits
A second stream of revenue for corporations tied to those wars went to private security contractors, some of which guarded U.S. facilities or critical infrastructure like Iraqi oil pipelines.
The most notorious of them was, of course, Blackwater, a number of whose employees were involved in a 2007massacreof 17 Iraqis in Baghdad’s Nisour Square. They opened fire on civilians at a crowded intersection while guarding a U.S. Embassy convoy. The attack prompted ongoing legal and civil cases that continued into the Trump era, when several perpetrators of the massacre werepardonedby the president.
In the wake of those killings, Blackwater wasrebrandedseveral times, first as XE Services and then as Academii, before eventuallymergingwith Triple Canopy, another private contracting firm. Blackwater founder Erik Prince then separated from the company, but he has sincerecruitedprivate mercenaries on behalf of the United Arab Emirates for deployment to the civil war in Libya in violation of a United Nations arms embargo. Prince also unsuccessfullyproposedto the Trump administration that he recruit a force of private contractors meant to be the backbone of the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan.
Another task taken up by private firms Titan and CACI International was theinterrogationof Iraqi prisoners.Both companieshad interrogators and translators on the ground at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, a site where such prisoners werebrutally tortured.
The number of personnel deployed and the revenues received by security and reconstruction contractors grew dramatically as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan wore on. The Congressional Research Serviceestimatedthat by March 2011 there were more contractor employees in Iraq and Afghanistan (155,000) than American uniformed military personnel (145,000). In its August 2011 final report, the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan put the figure even higher,statingthat “contractors represent more than half of the U.S. presence in the contingency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, at times employing more than a quarter-million people.”
While an armed contractor who had served in the Marines could earn as much as$200,000annually in Iraq, about three-quarters of the contractor work force there was made up of people from countries like Nepal or the Philippines, or Iraqi citizens. Poorly paid, at times they received as little as$3,000per year. A 2017analysisby the Costs of War project documented “abysmal labor conditions” and major human rights abuses inflicted on foreign nationals working on U.S.-funded projects in Afghanistan, including false imprisonment, theft of wages, and deaths and injuries in areas of conflict.
With the U.S. military in Iraq reduced to arelatively modest numberof armed “advisors” and no American forces left in Afghanistan, such contractors are now seeking foreign clients. For example, a U.S. firm — Tier 1 Group, which was founded by a former employee of Blackwater —trainedfour of the Saudi operatives involved in the murder of Saudi journalist and U.S. resident Jamal Khashoggi, an effort funded by the Saudi government. As theNew York Timesnotedwhen it broke that story, “Such issues are likely to continue as American private military contractors increasingly look to foreign clients to shore up their business as the United States scales back overseas deployments after two decades of war.”
Add in one more factor to the two-decade “war on terror” explosion of corporate profits. Overseas arms sales alsorose sharplyin this era. The biggest and most controversial market for U.S. weaponry in recent years has been the Middle East, particularly sales to countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which have been involved in a devastating war in Yemen, as well as fueling conflicts elsewhere in the region.
Donald Trump made the most noise about Middle East arms sales and their benefits to the U.S. economy. However, the giant weapons-producing corporations actually sold more weaponry to Saudi Arabia, on average, during the Obama administration, including three major offers in 2010 thattotaledmore than $60 billion for combat aircraft, attack helicopters, armored vehicles, bombs, missiles, and guns — virtually an entire arsenal. Many of those systems were used by the Saudis in their intervention in Yemen, which has involved the killing ofthousandsof civilians in indiscriminate air strikes and the imposition of a blockade that hascontributedsubstantially to the deaths of nearly a quarter of a million people to date.
Forever War Profiteering?
Reining in the excess profits of weapons contractors and preventing waste, fraud, and abuse by private firms involved in supporting U.S. military operations will ultimately require reduced spending on war and on preparations for war. So far, unfortunately, Pentagon budgets only continue to rise and yet more money flows to the big five weapons firms.
To alter this remarkably unvarying pattern, a new strategy is needed, one that increases the role of American diplomacy, while focusing on emerging and persistent non-military security challenges. “National security” needs to be redefined not in terms of a new “cold war” with China, but to forefront crucial issues like pandemics and climate change.
It’s time to put a halt to the direct and indirect foreign military interventions the United States has carried out in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Yemen, and so many other places in this century. Otherwise, we’re in for decades of more war profiteering by weapons contractors reaping massive profits with impunity.
Another twenty-year anniversary is the World Conference Against Racism (WCAR) that took place in Durban, South Africa between August 31, and September 8. The George W. Bush administration walked out of that meeting and the Obama administration boycotted the 10th anniversary. BAR contributor and editor, Ajamu Baraka delivered a speech in Paris on the meaning of Durban almost two decades ago that we believe is as relevant today as it was then.
In the wake of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and the 20th anniversary of the mass murders of September 11, 2001, the corporate mainstream and alternative media have been replete with articles analyzing the consequences of 9/11 that resulted in the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and its alleged withdrawal after two decades of war.
These critiques have ranged from mild to harsh, and have covered issues from the loss of civil liberties due to The Patriot Act and government spying through all the wars “on terror” in so many countries with their disastrous consequences and killing fields. Many of these articles have emphasized how, as a result of the Bush administration’s response to 9/11, the U.S. has lost its footing and brought on the demise of the American empire and its standing in the world. Some writers celebrate this and others bemoan it. Most seem to consider it inevitable.
This flood of articles has been authored by writers from across the political spectrum from the left through the center to the right. All were outraged in their own ways, as such dramatic events typically manage to elicit much spilled ink informed by the writers’ various ideological positions in a media world where the categories of left and right have become meaningless.
These articles have included cries about phony tears for the wrong victims (those who died in the Twin Towers, Pentagon, and on the planes), how good intelligence could have prevented 9/11, how so many died in vain, how it all led to torture, how whistle blowers were not heeded, how the military was right, how the collapse of the towers led to the collapse of the American empire, how bin Laden won, how evil U.S. war making came home in the form of 9/11 evil, how the longest war was in vain, how the Pentagon received vast sums of money over decades, how the withdrawal from Afghanistan was a betrayal of the 9/11 victims, etc.
Many of the points made were valid; others were not. This flood of opinionated outrage was very emotional and no doubt stirred deep feelings in readers. It fed on the widespread feeling in the country that something dreadful has occurred, but what it is isn’t exactly clear. The sense of mass confusion and continual disaster permeating the air and infecting people’s daily lives. The sense of unreality existing everywhere.
These articles have almost run their course and a new series of post mortems can be anticipated as fear and trembling attaches to new matters, particularly the ongoing Covid-19 fear porn minus the dire consequences of government policies. Fear is the name of the game and untruth snakes through the media hidden in the grass of truth. Many of the articles I referred to above – and you can check for yourself as I have purposely left out names and links – contain truths, but truths that disguise deeper untruths upon which the truths are allegedly based. I will leave the logic lesson to you.
Since many of these articles have been penned by liberal writers, some of whom one might naively expect to grasp essentials, and since those further to the right are considered defenders of Pax Americana, I will quote the outspoken anti-war singer/songwriter Phil Ochs, who prefaced his trenchant 1965 song, Love Me I’m a Liberal, with these words about logic:
In every political community there are varying shades of political opinion. One of the shadiest of these is the liberals. An outspoken group on many subjects. Ten degrees to the left of center in good times. Ten degrees to the right of center if it affects them personally. Here, then, is a lesson in safe logic.
So here’s the rub about the logic. Almost without exception (there are a handful of truthful writers aside from those I am here referring to, such as Kit Knightly, Michel Chossudovsky, Pepe Escobar, et al.), from the left to the right and everywhere in between, the authors of all these articles about the mass murders of September 11, 2001 and Afghanistan have based their points on a false premise.
A false premise. This is the way minds are shaped in the era of mass propaganda and servile journalism. Assume (or make believe) something is true despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, and build from there. Slip in this premise or background assumption as if it were truer than true. This is what has happened throughout the media in the last two weeks. It is not new but worth pointing out.
The false premise is this: That 9/11 was a terror attack carried out by Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda as blow-back for American wars against Muslims, and this terror attack on the U.S. led to the invasion of Afghanistan, Iraq, etc.
The evidence is overwhelming that this premise is false. In fact, the evidence makes clear that 9/11 was an inside job, a false flag attack, carried out by sinister forces within the government of the United States with a little help from certain foreign junior partners to justify its subsequent war crimes across the globe. I will not explore here the ample evidence concerning 9/11, for it is readily available to readers who have the will to look. Even the use of the shorthand – 9/11 for the events of September 11, 2001 – that I have used here for brevity’s sake, is a crucial part of the linguistic propaganda used to frighten and conjure up thoughts of an ongoing national emergency, as I have written elsewhere.
One is not supposed to say that the mass murders of September 11, 2001 were a false flag attack, for it touches a realty that is so disturbing in its consequences that all the hand wringing post-mortems must deny: That nearly three thousand innocent people in the U.S. had first to be murdered as a pretext for killing millions around the world. It is a lesson in radical evil that is very difficult to swallow, and so must be hidden in a vast tapestry of lies and safe logic. American innocence can survive the disclosures of U.S. atrocities overseas because the deaths of foreigners have never meant much to Americans, but to bring it all back home is anathema.
It is another example of the unspeakable, as the Trappist monk Thomas Merton said long ago and James W. Douglass referenced in his monumental book, JFK and the Unspeakable, to explain why John Kennedy died at the hands of the CIA and why that fact had to be suppressed. The mass murders of September 11, 2001 recapitulate that systemic evil that defies speech.
It is the void that contradicts everything that is spoken even before the words are said; the void that gets into the language of public and official declarations at the very moment when they are pronounced, and makes them ring dead with the hollowness of the abyss. It is the void out of which Eichmann drew the punctilious exactitude of his obedience…
From true writers and journalists we should expect something better – that they don’t repeat official declarations, utter hollow platitudes, and build analyses on false premises – but these are not the best of times, to rephrase Ochs, and safe logic keeps one’s legitimacy intact and protects one’s brand.
It’s always personal when it comes to the unspeakable.
The constant demand that we “Never forget!,” the events of September 11, 2001 is rather laughable. Forgetting is difficult after enduring 20 years of war propaganda. News stories about that day are plentiful albeit useless, that is to say they add nothing to our understanding of why the U.S. was attacked and depend upon sentiment, jingoism, and tried and true claims of exceptionalism to maintain fear, hatred, and support for war.
Anyone filling their lockdown downtime binge-watching the final series of US spy show Homeland might have found its fictionalised account of the US trying to get out of Afghanistan in a hurry pretty prescient.
“It’ll be Saigon all over again,” the gravelly-voiced Afghan president says as he warns the US that making peace with the Taliban will end in tears.
When the US troops left this month, it was indeed a case of “choppers at the embassy compound” once more.
And after that, getting other people out who feared the Taliban became a story all of its own.
RNZAF and NZDF forces dispatched to get out New Zealand citizens and visa holders provided the media with dramatic stories of improvised rescues.
One exclusive in the New Zealand Herald described a grandmother in a wheelchair hauled out from the crowd via a sewage filled ditch, illustrated with NZDF images and footage.
But while the government said it got about 390 people out of the country, Scoop’s Gordon Campbell pointed out authorities here have not said how many were already New Zealand citizens — or Afghan citizens or contractors whose service put them and their family members in danger.
Afghan translator Bashir Ahmad — who worked for the NZDF in Bamiyan province and came to New Zealand subsequently — told RNZ’s Morning Reporthe knew of 36 more people still stuck there.
Sticking around
Afghan channel Tolo news broadcasts the Taliban’s first press conference since they took over in Kabul. Image: RNZ screenshot
The end of 20 years of US occupation was witnessed by BBC’s veteran correspondent Lyse Doucet. She was also there in 1989 reporting for Canada’s CBC when the Soviet Union’s forces pulled out after its occupation that lasted almost a decade.
Back then she pondered how she would work when power changed hands to the Mujaheddin. Thirty-two years on, herself and others in Afghanistan — including New Zealander Charlotte Bellis who reports from Kabul for global channel Al Jazeera — are also wondering what the Taliban has in store for them.
The last time the Taliban were in charge — 1996 to 2001 — the media were heavily controlled and independent journalism was almost impossible.
Local and international media have flourished in Afghanistan after the US ousted the Taliban 20 years ago – but now their future is far from clear.
The Taliban have offered reassurances it will respect press freedoms. On August 21 they announced a committee including journalists would be created to “address the problems of the media in Kabul.”
But some have already reported harassment and confiscation of equipment. Five journalists from Etilaatroz, a daily newspaper in Kabul, were arrested and beaten by Taliban, the editor-in-chief said on Wednesday.
In the meantime, the Taliban have been getting to know reporters who are still there.
Charlotte Bellis told RNZ’s Sunday Morning she was sticking around to cover what happens next in Afghanistan and build relationships with the Taliban — and even give them advice.
“I told them … if you’re going to run the country you need to build trust and you need to be transparent and authentic – and do as much media as you can to try and reassure people that they don’t need to be scared of you,” she said.
It helps that Al Jazeera is based in Qatar where the Taliban have a political office.
Earlier this month, the Taliban’s slick spokesman Abdul Qahar Balkhi told Charlotte Bellis they were grateful for New Zealand offering financial aid to Afghanistan.
But that money is for the UN agencies and the Red Cross and Red Crescent operations — and not an endorsement of the Taliban takeover.
“They’ve cottoned on to the fact they can use social media for propaganda,” she told Newstalk ZB.
“When journalists run these stories it implies that governments are supporting the Taliban when nothing could be further from the truth,” Clark said.
How should the media deal with an outfit which turfed the recognised government out of power — and whose real intentions are not yet known?
The Taliban’s governing cabinet named last week has several hardliners — and no women.
Will reporters really be able to report under the Taliban from now on?
‘Please, my life is in danger.’ Image: RNZ Mediawatch
Peter Greste was the BBC’s correspondent in Afghanistan in the mid-1990s when the Taliban was poised to take over the first time — and he is now the UNESCO chair in journalism at the University of Queensland.
“We need to make it abundantly clear to the Taliban that they need to stick to their promises to protect journalists and media workers — and let them continue to work. The Taliban‘s words and actions don’t always align but at the very least we need to start with that,” Greste said.
“And we need to give refuge and visas to media workers who want to get out,” he said.
“Watching the way they treat journalists is going to be an important barometer of the way they plan to operate,” said Greste, who is working with the Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom to monitor abuses and to create an online “Afghan media freedom tracker”.
“There’s been an obvious gap between the spokespeople who say they are prepared to let journalists operate and women continue to work — and the troubling reports of attacks by Taliban fighters on the ground, going door-to-door looking for journalists and their families,” he said.
“We need to maintain communications with them. We need to use all the tools we can to make sure we are across where all the people are. Afghanistan’s borders are like Swiss cheese. It’s not always easy to get across — but it is possible,” he said.
Peter Greste said the translators and fixers the international journalists rely on are absolutely critical to international media.
“Good translators don’t just translate the words– but help you understand the context. To simply give refuge just to the people who have their faces in their stories and names on bylines is not fair,” Greste said.
Peter Greste, UNESCO chair of journalism at the University of Queensland, Australia … Image: RNZ Mediawatch
Greste was jailed for months in Egypt on trumped-up charges in 2014 along with local colleagues when the regime there decided it didn’t like their reporting for Al Jazeera.
It triggered a remarkable campaign in which rival media outlets banded together to demand their release under the slogan “Journalism is not a crime”.
Does he fear for journalists if the Taliban resort to old ways of handling the media?
Will we even know if they make life impossible for media and journalists outside the capital in the future?
“The country has mobile phone networks now it has social media networks. It is possible to find out what’s going on in those regions and it’s going to be difficult for the Taliban to uphold that mirage – if that’s what it is,” he said.
“I’m not prepared at this point to write them off as an workable and we need to acknowledge the realities of what just happened in Afghanistan,” he said.
When Greste first arrived in Afghanistan for the BBC in 1994 there was no reliable electricity supply even in the capital city — let alone local television like TOLO news.
Al-Jazeera news channel’s Australian journalist Peter Greste listens to the original court verdict in June. Image: RNZ Mediawatch
“One of the great successes of the last decade or two has been the flowering of local media. Western organisations and donors and Afghans have understood that having a free media is one of the most important aspects of having a functioning society,” he said.
Afghans have really taken to that with real enthusiasm. The number of outlets and journalists has been phenomenal. You can’t put that genie back in his bottle without some serious consequences,” Greste told Mediawatch.
The regime in Egypt wasn’t afraid to imprison him and his colleagues back in 2014. Does he fear for international reporters like Charlotte Bellis and her colleagues?
“Al Jazeera will have a lot of security in place to make sure the operation is protected,” Greste said.
“But of course I worry for Charlotte — and also the staff at work with her. As a foreign correspondent though, I think you enjoy more protection than most other journos locally,” Greste said.
“If my name had been Mohammed and not Peter and if I’d been Egyptian and not Australian or a foreigner there wouldn’t have been anywhere near the kind of outrage and consequences for the government,” Greste said.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
The authorization for military use of force (AUMF), which gave President George W. Bush’s administration a blank check for war after the September 11th attacks, still has not been repealed. On September 14, 2001, Representative Barbara Lee cast the sole vote in the House of Representatives against the AUMF resolution. “However difficult this vote may be, some of us must urge the use of restraint,” Lee declared on the House floor. “Our country is in a state of mourning. Some of us must say, let us step back for a moment. Let us just pause for a minute and think through the implications of our actions today so that this does not spiral out of control.”
The 20th anniversary of September 11 is behind us now, but the George W. Bush Reputation Rehabilitation Tour continues unchecked, and the cognitive dissonance surrounding it remains thicker than the frosting on my daughter’s last birthday cake. “He seems decent compared to the other guy,” I overheard someone say. It was almost too much to bear.
I suppose it would have been impossible to pass the day without Bush making an appearance, but it would have been nice if he had kept it simple: “That was awful, I’m sorry for “fixing the facts around the policy” and lying the country into two failed calamity wars that started a bunch of other wars and torturing people and spying on everyone and looting the Treasury and dropping a giant turd on your future, so I’m going to go paint in Kennebunkport for the remainder of my years and never be seen again until they put me in the ground. Bye, y’all.”
Would that it were so. Instead, the foulest failson of fearsome privilege went and made himself a bit of news on Saturday by alluding that Donald Trump’s domestic terrorism brigades are not such a good thing for the country. He named no names, but even that infamously obtuse man can pop a cap in a fish when it’s in a very small barrel.
Speaking from the Shanksville, Pennsylvania, memorial for the passengers of Flight 93, Bush alluded to “growing evidence that the dangers to our country can come not only across borders, but from violence that gathers within.” That got everyone’s attention in a hurry.
“There is little cultural overlap between violent extremists abroad and violent extremists at home,” Bush continued. “But in their disdain for pluralism, in their disregard for human life, in their determination to defile national symbols, they are children of the same foul spirit. And it is our continuing duty to confront them.”
Quick note: When the U.S. withdrew from Bush’s war in Afghanistan, some of Donald Trump’s favorite Proud Boys were vocally thrilled, considering the Taliban’s actions a worthy roadmap for their own plans. “Little cultural overlap, George?” More than you and your Republican pals may want to think.
To be fair, this wasn’t the first time Bush gave Trump and his minions a soft serving of the back of his hand. After the 1/6 insurrection, Bush said, “This is how election results are disputed in a banana republic — not our democratic republic,” adding that he was “appalled by the reckless behavior of some political leaders since the election.” Again, no names, but the inference was unmistakable … though I winced hard at the time to hear Bush, of all people, use the (notably racist) term “banana republic” after gaining the presidency by way of the bag job they call the 2000 election.
Had Bush stopped there, this column probably would not exist … but, of course, he didn’t stop there. “A malign force seems at work in our common life that turns every disagreement into an argument, and every argument into a clash of cultures,” he said in Shanksville. “So much of our politics has become a naked appeal to anger, fear and resentment. That leaves us worried about our nation and our future together.”
Full stop, what?
You know what year was worse than 2001? 2002. That was the year the swelling started to go down after 9/11 and Bush’s people, along with their allies in Congress and the news media (most of the news media, not just Fox), went full-tilt into fearmongering and brazen racism. Bush said many nice things about Muslims and peace and getting along, while his administration arrested Muslims by the score and slapped together anti-Muslim no-fly lists that included 4-year-old children.
2002 was the year of “Watch what you say” from the press secretary, well-timed terror “alerts” that seemed to come along a few minutes after any negative story about the administration hit the wires, and WHY DO YOU HATE AMERICA whenever anyone dared question the lethal course we were taking. 2002 was the first full year of the war in Afghanistan, and unbeknownst to most of us, was also the year when the groundwork for the Iraq War WMD lies was being prepared. The torture of Muslims around the world began in full not long after.
“At a time when religious bigotry might have flowed freely, I saw Americans reject prejudice and embrace people of Muslim faith,” said Bush in Shanksville. “That is the nation I know. At a time when nativism could have stirred hatred and violence against people perceived as outsiders, I saw Americans reaffirm their welcome to immigrants and refugees. That is the nation I know.”
According to the FBI, hate crimes against Muslims had increased 1,617 percent by the end of 2001. Mosques were vandalized and burned, and those seeking to worship at them were brutalized. George W. Bush was not personally directing violence against these communities, but in his quest to maximize his power after 9/11, he wound the country up so tight with a cocktail of fear and patriotic balderdash that racist violence was an obvious outcome, and it was. There is little chance Trump’s rampant anti-Muslim bigotry would have bloomed as well as it did without the Bush era preparing the ground first.
That is the nation I know, Mr. Bush, and you had a heavy hand in creating it … which brings me back around to the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance. The country, and in particular the news media, spent the weekend gazing deeply into its navel wondering, “What does it all mean? How did we come to this dismal place after 20 years?”
A primary answer, of course, should have been “the Bush administration,” which presided over 9/11 and got us into Iraq and Afghanistan. That triple play served to put us down in this deep hole, but few people in positions of responsibility seem willing to say it. The TV news people want no part of it, though their role is almost equally bleak.
Many are rightly worried about the ongoing effects of Trump’s “Big Lie” about the 2020 election being stolen. What about Bush’s “Big Lie” regarding WMD in Iraq? Cognitive dissonance is what. That deliberate decision to mislead the country into a two-decade war has cost us countless lives and trillions of dollars. It touches every aspect of our existence now, and not for the good, but the corporate media and politicians largely refused to acknowledge it even on September 11, 2020, a day when a reckoning with what we’ve done and what we’ve become seemed just and proper.
That didn’t happen, and George W. Bush was allowed out in public again without even the most minor public displays of accountability. Instead, we spent the weekend lamenting our sorry national estate while one of the principal authors of that collapse was treated like a returning hero.
That is cognitive dissonance to the bone. It is our lasting collective inheritance from a former president who knew exactly what he was doing and who he was doing it for all those years ago. All you really need to remember is the smirk. The rest is aftermath, and the ashes in our hair.
The withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan on the eve of the 20th anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attacks that were used to justify multiple Middle Eastern interventions is a fitting occasion to consider the ultimate cost of military combat.
Thanks to advances in military medicine, soldiers injured in Iraq and Afghanistan have had a much higher survival rate, recovering from wounds that would have been fatal decades earlier in Vietnam. As a result, far more post-9/11 combat veterans carry wounds of war, both visible and invisible, for the rest of their lives.
Many news reports cite the trillions of dollars that have been spent directly by the Department of Defense and related agencies on two simultaneous occupations and other global war on terror operations.
Twenty years after 9/11, the war on terror has remade the U.S. into a far more militarized actor, both around the world and at home. The human costs of this evolution are many — including mass incarceration, widespread surveillance, the violent repression of immigrant communities, and hundreds of thousands of lives lost to war and violence.
The United States’ 245-year history as a political entity has been one long trail of wars and more wars. It is estimated that nearly 95 percent of that historical span has seen the nation involved in either all-out wars, proxy conflicts, or other military subterfuges.
But since the 9/11 terror attacks in 2001, the US has gone into hyper-war mode. Twenty years ago, the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan ushered in multiple other American wars and covert operations from Asia to Africa, from the Middle East to the Americas.
At one point, the former Obama administration was bombing seven countries simultaneously all in the name of “fighting terrorism”. Hundreds of US bombs rain down somewhere on the planet every day.
What is rather sickening is how the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 event this weekend is marked with solemn speeches by US president Joe Biden and his British counterpart Boris Johnson – the two countries that spearheaded the “War on Terror” era.
Biden claims that 9/11 demonstrates the “unity and resilience” of the American people, while Johnson blusters with platitudes about 9/11 showing that “terrorists did not defeat Western democracy and freedoms”. This self-indulgent piffle is contemptible and nauseating.
Two decades after the US and Britain launched their criminal blitzkrieg on Afghanistan and the rest of the world, those two nations are more financially broke than ever. Internally, they are more bitterly divided than ever. More evidently, their so-called democracies are in reality oligarchies where a tiny rich elite rule over a mass of impoverished people who are spied on and treated like serfs by unaccountable secret agencies and a mass media in hock with oligarchic masters.
If there was a genuine commemoration of 9/11 it would entail a mass uprising by the people to overthrow the war-mongering class system that Biden and Johnson serve as frontmen.
Just this week – of all weeks – the American and British states are in effect admitting that their societies are collapsing from vast economic inequality and crumbling infrastructure. The Biden administration is trying to release a budget of up to $4.5 trillion to alleviate poverty and repair decrepit roads, bridges, buildings and other public utilities.
The Johnson regime in Britain is forced to admit that the National Health Service is overwhelmed by a chronic lack of funding. Taxes are being hiked that will hit low-income workers in order to pay for the £12 billion ($16bn) needed to prop up the enfeebled health service.
All of the cost for trying to repair the US and Britain to make these countries a modicum of decency for its citizens to live in could have been covered by the expenditure on wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Yemen and elsewhere that the US and Britain have directly or indirectly been involved in.
A new estimate of the cost for the “war on terror” by the United States alone is put at $8 trillion. This is roughly double the infrastructure bill that Biden is trying to get passed by Congress. American politicians are objecting to the extravagance of that “rescue budget”, yet they had no qualms about spending $8 trillion on wars. It is also estimated that for Britain its military adventurism in Afghanistan alone cost a total of $30 billion. Again, just imagine how British society might be better off if that money had been spent instead on attending to the health needs of its citizens.
But 9/11 also ushered in wanton warmongering regimes in Washington and London that have bled the American and British public of finances and democratic rights. In 2001, the US national debt was about $6 trillion. This year that debt burden on future American generations has escalated to $28 trillion – a crushing, unsustainable burden largely driven by criminal wars.
The healthcare costs for American military veterans wounded and maimed from the wars on terror are projected at $2 trillion. Over 30,000 US service members and veterans are reckoned to have committed suicide over the past 20 years. That’s 10 times the number of American people who died on the day of 9/11.
Untold millions of innocent civilians were killed by the wars that the US and British launched after 9/11. Such suffering and destruction all for nothing except for the enrichment of war-profiteering corporations and the oligarchic elite.
fThe United States and Britain have been so deformed by criminal wars they have become dysfunctional and dystopian. They have inflicted failed states around the world, but none more so than on their own people. The towers that fell on 9/11 were a premonition of much bigger collapse.
‘Ahmad Zaidan, a correspondent for the Qatari outlet Al Jazeera, was ferried to the wedding with a camera crew in an effort to provide bin Laden with the publicity he had been denied by the Taliban. Zaidan witnessed bin Laden rise before the guests to deliver verses of jihadist poetry: “She sails into the waves flanked by arrogance, haughtiness and false power. To her doom she moves slowly,” the wealthy sheikh exclaimed. “Your the management of savagery 76 brothers in the East readied themselves. And the war camels prepared to move.” ‘
A long-suppressed FBI report on Saudi Arabia’s connections to the 9/11 plot has revealed that Saudi religious officials stationed in the United States had more significant connections to two of the hijackers than has been previously known. The 2016 report was released late Saturday night under an executive order from President Joe Biden, who promised to make it public no later than the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. The 16-page document was a final inventory of circumstantial evidence and leads from the FBI’s investigation of Saudi ties to the plot; it was heavily redacted.
There were actually two Afghan wars. The first began within a few weeks of the 9-11 tragedy, when the US was attacked by Al Qaeda with the assistance of elements of the Saudi Arabia ruling elite.
In the first war US forces invaded Afghanistan behind the excuse its mission and goal was to capture Bin Laden and deny Al Qaeda a base in that country, even though there is ample evidence the Taliban had offered to kick Bin Laden out in exchange for no US invasion. The Bush administration rejected the Taliban offer because its actual mission and objective was always greater than just capturing Bin Laden, or even occupying Afghanistan.
The first Afghan war was over in a matter of a few months, when US forces drove the Taliban out of government in Afghanistan and into the countryside while sending forces of Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda retreating into the mountains bordering Pakistan
Twenty years ago, I was on a plane from Rarotonga to Auckland. Lovely flight, with a path at the end I had never experienced before.
Almost from the tip of the North Island, down to Tamaki Makaurau — the rising sun bathing the hills and coastline in rich, almost mango, orange. So rich and orange that for a second I wondered if I had mistakenly got on a flight to Aussie, not Aotearoa.
Half asleep from the then usual awake-all-night, early morning departure, dawn arrival, I floated through duty free and customs, not noticing anything really different — until our old Cook Islands Press photographer Dean Treml who was on the same flight came up looking alarmed.
“There’s been an attack in New York – two planes have flown into the World Trade Towers,” or words to that effect. I was like, “..whaaat? No …Really??”
He nodded, hurried off.
I blinked a bit, shook off my disbelief, and forgot about it as we moved through the lines, looking forward to seeing my younger son, Mikaera.
He was there in arrivals. Rushed to give my three-year-old a kneeling hug. Smiled up at his grandparents.
‘Stay calm’
“Stay calm,” the grandfather told me, “and don’t get upset, but terrorists have attacked the Twin Towers in America,” or words to that effect. “It’s on the screen behind you.”
In those days, news was still played on the big multiscreens over the arrival doors. I turned, looked, and caught sight of a jet slicing into one of the towers. Over the rest of the day, that scene, and its twin, were replayed over and again, as a stunned world witnessed an unthinkably cinematic display of destruction.
And then, hours later, one by one, the towers dropped.
Like billions of others, I watched, in my case in between playing with my young son, alone at his mum’s home, looking over his shoulder at the television.
A few times it got too much. Made sure Mikaera was okay with toys and/or food, then stepped outside to the garage to cry, the replay sight of people jumping from the smoking towers to their deaths; hiding my tears and low moans of stunned despair.
Big breaths, wipe away the tears, back inside to play with blocks and trucks, and … planes. One eye on the TV.
Nearly 3000 people died that day. Almost all Americans, with a few hundred other nationalities.
Since then?
Tragedy of so-called ‘War on Terror’
Millions of non-Americans have died in the Middle East, mostly from economic blockades resulting in deaths from starvation and treatable diseases. Hundreds of thousands dying in a so-called “War on Terror” that served to produce tens of thousands more “terrorists”, vowing to avenge the deaths of their children, siblings, parents, aunties, cousins and uncles.
Western states have spent trillions of dollars, weapons dealers making obscenely fat profits on the back of jingoistic propaganda from news media which, to this day, counts Western deaths to the last man and woman, but barely mentions any civilian deaths from their bullets, bombs and drones.
Profits that have been used to bribe officials at home and abroad, via a network of secrecy havens such as New Zealand and the Cook Islands, but mostly via American states like Delaware, or financial centres like London in the UK, flushing trillions more through millions of secret companies for the benefit of a few.
9/11, they said, changed everything.
Twenty years later, with the war on terror a complete and utter failure, everything certainly has changed.
For the worse.
Western financial hypocrisy
Trillions continue to be hidden, including with our help, legally or otherwise. Legality being a very moveable feast. Western states pick on tiny offshore banking centres like the Niue, Samoa and the Cook Islands, while ignoring the gaping holes in their own banks and finance centres.
Governments like New Zealand and Australia fund corruption studies in the Pacific, as one regional example, but not their own.
And, like little children, we are still over-awed when famous people come to visit our homelands, happily posing and smiling in delight whenever big country people deign to visit our shores.
Unlike when then Tahitian president Gaston Flosse came to Rarotonga in 1996, and Cook Islanders protested nuclear testing, for example, the Cook Islands happily welcomed then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2012.
Even media people and supposed journalists lined up to grin, to grip the hand of a leader reported as once asking about using a drone to assassinate Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.
In fact, in 1996, I was one of those people, “meeting” Clinton on a rope line at the Atlanta Olympics when I was “Press Attache” for our Olympics team.
“Greetings from the South Pacific!” I said cheerily when she offered her hand to me, among a hundred or so others who had suddenly gathered.
“Outstanding!”, she replied, equally delighted.
Of course, none of us knew then what was coming.
But we know now.
Cook Islands in lockstep
And still the Cook Islands walks in lockstep with our powerful neighbours, a “dear friend” of Australia’s ruling party and its unbelievably corrupt mining, military and media networks.
Two decades later, the Homeland seems yet to learn any lessons from 9/11, yet to admit any responsibility for its part in enabling #corruption, money laundering and terrorism which breeds extremism, hate, and death, on all sides.
Instead, our government works against the interests of our own region, a Pacific pawn used and abused in age-old colonial tactics of divide et empera – divide and conquer – a phrase going back over two millennia.
Today our peoples are further misled by a tsunami of fake news – misinformation and disinformation – from mysteriously well-resourced sources. Distracted from real responses to the #covid19 pandemic, which distracts further from even bigger threats from global warming — or “climate change” as it was known for so long, before leaders started only recently admitting we face a “climate crisis” — but still locked to “market mechanisms” as a supposed solution.
So, what are the solutions?
Fight fake news. Fight corruption. Fight the hateful, extremist, death cults hiding behind religion, especially within the largest, most powerful faith in the world — Christianity.
Fight for a world where shorelines are bathed in mango dawns, and our children don’t grow up watching death replayed every single day of their lives.
Jason Brown is founder of Journalism Agenda 2025 and writes about Pacific and world journalism and ethically globalised Fourth Estate issues. He is a former co-editor of Cook Islands Press. This article is republished with permission.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was among a small group of U.S. citizens who sat on milk crates or stood holding signs, across from the U.S. Mission to the United Nations in Manhattan. We had been fasting from solid foods for a month, calling for an end to brutal economic warfare waged against Iraq through imposition of U.N. sanctions. Each Friday of our fast, we approached the entrance to the U.S. Mission to the United Nations carrying lentils and rice, asking the U.S. officials to break our fast with us, asking them to hear our reports, gathered after visiting destitute Iraqi hospitals and homes. On four successive Friday afternoons, New York police handcuffed us and took us to jail.
Two days after the passenger planes attacked the World Trade Center, U.S. Mission to the UN officials called us and asked that we visit with them.
I had naively hoped this overture could signify empathy on the part of U.S. officials. Perhaps the 9/11 attack would engender sorrow over the suffering and pain endured by people of Iraq and other lands when the U.S. attacks them. The officials at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations wanted to know why we went to Iraq but we sensed they were mainly interested in filling out forms to comply with an order to gather more information about U.S. people going to Iraq.
The U.S. government and military exploited the grief and shock following 9/11 attacks to raise fears, promote Islamophobia and launch forever wars which continue to this day. Under the guise of “counter-terrorism,” the U.S. now pledges to combine drone attacks, surveillance, airstrikes, and covert operations to continue waging war in Afghanistan. Terror among Afghans persists.
I visited Kabul, Afghanistan in September 2019. While there, a young friend whom I’ve known for five years greeted me and then spoke in a hushed voice. “Kathy,” he asked, “do you know about Qazi Qadir, Bahadir, Jehanzeb and Saboor?” I nodded. I had read a news account, shortly before I arrived, about Afghan Special Operations commandos, trained by the CIA, having waged a night raid in the city of Jalalabad at the home of four brothers. They awakened the young men, then shot and killed them. Neighbors said the young men had gathered to welcome their father back from the Hajj; numerous colleagues insisted the young men were innocent.
My young friend has been deeply troubled by many other incidents in which the United States directly attacked innocent people or trained Afghan units to do so. Two decades of U.S. combat in Afghanistan have made civilians vulnerable to drone attacks, night raids, airstrikes and arrests. Over 4 million people have become internally displaced as they fled from battles or could no longer survive on scarred, drought stricken lands.
In an earlier visit to Kabul, at the height of the U.S. troop surge, another young friend earnestly asked me to tell parents in the United States not to send their sons and daughters to Afghanistan. “Here it is very dangerous for them,” he said. “And they do not really help us.”
For many years, the United States claimed its mission in Afghanistan improved the lives of Afghan women and children. But essentially, the U.S. war improved the livelihoods of those who designed, manufactured, sold and used weaponry to kill Afghans.
When the U.S. was winding down its troop surge in 2014, but not its occupation, military officials undertook what they called “the largest retrograde mission in U.S. military history,” incurring enormous expenses. One estimate suggested the war in Afghanistan, that year, was costing $2 million per U.S. soldier. That same year, UNICEF officials calculated that the cost of adding iodized salt into the diet of an Afghan infant, a step which could prevent chronic brain damage in children suffering from acute malnourishment, would be 5 cents per child per year.
Which endeavor would the majority of U.S. people have opted to support, in their personal budgets, had they ever been given a choice? Profligate U.S. military spending in Afghanistan or vital assistance for a starving Afghan child?
One of my young Afghan friends says he is now an anarchist. He doesn’t place much trust in governments and militaries. He feels strong allegiance toward the grassroots network he has helped build, a group I would normally name and celebrate, but must now refer to as “our young friends in Afghanistan,” in hopes of protecting them from hostile groups.
The brave and passionate dedication they showed as they worked tirelessly to share resources, care for the environment, and practice nonviolence has made them quite vulnerable to potential accusers who may believe they were too connected with westerners.
In recent weeks, I’ve been part of an ad hoc team assisting 60 young people and their family members who feel alarmed about remaining in Kabul and are sorting out their options to flee the country.
It’s difficult to forecast how Taliban rule will affect them.
Already, some extraordinarily brave people have held protests in in the provinces of Herat, Nimroz, Balkh and Farah, and in the city of Kabul where dozens of women took to the streets to demand representation in the new government and to insist that their rights must be protected.
In many provinces in Afghanistan, the Taliban may find themselves ruling over increasingly resentful people. Half the population already lives in poverty and economic catastrophe looms. In damage caused by war, people have lost harvests, homes and livestock. A third wave of COVID afflicts the country and three million Afghans face consequences of severe drought. Will the Taliban government have the resources and skills to cope with these overwhelming problems?
On the other hand, in some provinces, Taliban rule has seemed preferable to the previous government’s incompetence and corruption, particularly in regard to property or land disputes.
We should be honest. The Taliban are in power today because of a colossal mess the U.S. helped create.
Now, we U.S. citizens must insist on paying reparations for destruction caused by 20 years of war. To be meaningful, reparations must also include dismantling the warfare systems that caused so much havoc and misery. Our wars of choice were waged against people who meant us no harm. We must choose, now, to lay aside the cruel futility of our forever wars.
My young friend who whispered to me about human rights abuses in 2019 recently fled Afghanistan. He said he doesn’t want to be driven by fear, but he deeply wants to use his life to do good, to build a better world.
Ultimately, Afghanistan will need people like him and his friends if the country is ever to experience a future where basic human rights to food, shelter, health care and education are met. It will need people who have already made dedicated sacrifices for peace, believing in an Afghan adage which says “blood doesn’t wash away blood.”
Essentially, people in Afghanistan will need U.S. people to embrace this same teaching. We must express true sorrow, seek forgiveness, and show valor similar to that of the brave people insisting on human rights in Afghanistan today.
Collectively, recognizing the terrible legacy of 9/11, we must agree: To counter terror, abolish war.
The 20 years since those terrible attacks have been marked by endless wars, harsh immigration crackdowns, and expanded federal law enforcement powers that have cost us our privacy and targeted entire communities based on nothing more than race, religion, or ethnicity.
Those policies have also come at a tremendous monetary cost — and a dangerous neglect of domestic investment.
In a new report I co-authored with my colleagues at the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, we found that the federal government has spent $21 trillion on war and militarization both inside the U.S. and around the world over the past 20 years. That’s roughly the size of the entire U.S. economy.
Even while politicians have written blank checks for militarism year after year, they’ve said we can’t afford to address our most urgent issues. No wonder these past 20 years have been rough on U.S. families and communities.
After strong growth from 1970 to 2000, household incomes have stagnated for 20 years as Americans struggled through two recessions in the years leading up to the pandemic. As pandemic eviction moratoriums end, millions are at risk of homelessness.
Our public health systems have also been chronically underfunded, leaving the U.S. helpless to enact the testing, tracing, and quarantining that helped other countries limit the pandemic’s damage. Over 650,000 Americans have died from COVID-19 — the equivalent of a 9/11 every day for over seven months. The opioid epidemic claims another 50,000 lives a year.
Meanwhile extreme weather events like wildfires, hurricanes, and floods have grown in frequency over the past 20 years. The U.S. hasn’t invested nearly enough in either renewable energy or climate resiliency to deal with the increasing effects climate change has on our communities.
In the face of all this suffering, it’s clear that $21 trillion in spending hasn’t made us any safer.
Instead, the human costs have been staggering. Around the world, the forever wars have cost 900,000 lives and left 38 million homeless — and as the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan has shown us, they were a massive failure.
Our militarized spending has helped deport 5 million people over the past 20 years, often taking parents from their children. The majority of those deported hadn’t committed any crime except for being here.
Fortunately, there’s a silver lining: We’ve found that for just a fraction of what we’ve spent on militarization these last 20 years, we could start to make life much better.
For $4.5 trillion, we could build a renewable, upgraded energy grid for the whole country. For $2.3 trillion, we could create 5 million $15-an-hour jobs with benefits — for 10 years. For just $25 billion, we could vaccinate low-income countries against COVID-19, saving lives and stopping the march of new and more threatening virus variants.
We could do all that and more for less than half of what we’ve spent on wars and militarization in the last 20 years. With communities across the country in dire need of investment, the case for avoiding more pointless, deadly wars couldn’t be clearer.
The best time for those investments would have been during the past 20 years. The next best time is now.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was among a small group of U.S. citizens who sat on milk crates or stood holding signs across from the U.S. Mission to the United Nations in Manhattan. We had been fasting from solid foods for a month, calling for an end to brutal economic warfare waged against Iraq through the imposition of U.N. sanctions. Each Friday of our fast, we approached the entrance to the U.S. Mission to the United Nations carrying lentils and rice, asking the U.S. officials to break our fast with us, asking them to hear our reports, gathered after visiting destitute Iraqi hospitals and homes. On four successive Friday afternoons, New York police handcuffed us and took us to jail.
Two days after the passenger planes attacked the World Trade Center, U.S. Mission to the U.N. officials called us and asked that we visit with them.
I had naively hoped this overture could signify empathy on the part of U.S. officials. Perhaps the 9/11 attack would engender sorrow over the suffering and pain endured by people of Iraq and other lands when the U.S. attacks them. The officials at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations wanted to know why we went to Iraq but we sensed they were mainly interested in filling out forms to comply with an order to gather more information about U.S. people going to Iraq.
The U.S. government and military exploited the grief and shock following the 9/11 attacks to raise fears, promote Islamophobia and launch forever wars which continue to this day. Under the guise of “counter-terrorism,” the United States now pledges to combine drone attacks, surveillance, airstrikes and covert operations to continue waging war in Afghanistan. Terror among Afghans persists.
I last visited Kabul, Afghanistan in September 2019. While there, a young friend I’ve known for five years greeted me and then spoke in a hushed voice. “Kathy,” he asked, “do you know about Qazi Qadir, Bahadir, Jehanzeb and Saboor?” I nodded. I had read a news account shortly before I arrived about Afghan Special Operations commandos, trained by the CIA, having waged a night raid in the city of Jalalabad at the home of four brothers. They awakened the young men, then shot and killed them. Neighbors said the young men had gathered to welcome their father back from the Hajj in Mecca; numerous colleagues insisted the young men were innocent.
My young friend has been deeply troubled by many other incidents in which the United States directly attacked innocent people or trained Afghan units to do so. Two decades of U.S. combat in Afghanistan have made civilians vulnerable to drone attacks, night raids, airstrikes and arrests. Over 4 million people have become internally displaced as they fled from battles or could no longer survive on scarred, drought stricken lands.
In an earlier visit to Kabul, at the height of the U.S. troop surge, another young friend earnestly asked me to tell parents in the United States not to send their sons and daughters to Afghanistan. “Here it is very dangerous for them,” he said. “And they do not really help us.”
For many years, the United States claimed its mission in Afghanistan improved the lives of Afghan women and children. But essentially, the U.S. war improved the livelihoods of those who designed, manufactured, sold and used weaponry to kill Afghans.
When the United States was winding down its troop surge in 2014 — but not its occupation — military officials undertook what they called “the largest retrograde mission in U.S. military history,” incurring enormous expenses. One estimate suggested the war in Afghanistan, that year, was costing $2 million per U.S. soldier. That same year, UNICEF officials calculated that the cost of adding iodized salt into the diet of an Afghan infant — helping to prevent chronic brain damage in children suffering from acute malnourishment — would be 5 cents per child per year.
Which endeavor would the majority of U.S. people have opted to support, in their personal budgets, had they ever been given a choice? Profligate U.S. military spending in Afghanistan or vital assistance for a starving Afghan child?
One of my young Afghan friends says he is now an anarchist. He doesn’t place much trust in governments and militaries. He feels strong allegiance toward the grassroots network he has helped build, a group I would normally name and celebrate, but must now refer to as “our young friends in Afghanistan,” in hopes of protecting them from hostile groups.
The brave and passionate dedication they showed as they worked tirelessly to share resources, care for the environment, and practice nonviolence has made them quite vulnerable to potential accusers who may believe they were too connected with westerners.
In recent weeks, I’ve been part of an ad hoc team assisting 60 young people and their family members who feel alarmed about remaining in Kabul and are sorting out their options to flee the country.
It’s difficult to forecast how Taliban rule will affect them.
Already, some extraordinarily brave people have held protests in the provinces of Herat, Nimroz, Balkh and Farah, and in the city of Kabul, where dozens of women took to the streets to demand representation in the new government and to insist that their rights must be protected.
In many provinces in Afghanistan, the Taliban may find themselves ruling over increasingly resentful people. Half the population already lives in poverty and economic catastrophe looms. In damage caused by war, people have lost harvests, homes and livestock. A third wave of COVID afflicts the country and 3 million Afghans face consequences of severe drought. Will the Taliban government have the resources and skills to cope with these overwhelming problems?
On the other hand, in some provinces, Taliban rule has seemed preferable to the previous government’s incompetence and corruption, particularly in regard to property or land disputes.
We should be honest. The Taliban are in power today because of a colossal mess the United States helped create.
Now, we U.S. citizens must insist on paying reparations for destruction caused by 20 years of war. To be meaningful, reparations must also include dismantling the warfare systems that caused so much havoc and misery. Our wars of choice were waged against people who meant us no harm. We must choose, now, to lay aside the cruel futility of our forever wars.
My young friend who whispered to me about human rights abuses in 2019 recently fled Afghanistan. He said he doesn’t want to be driven by fear, but he deeply wants to use his life to do good, to build a better world.
Ultimately, Afghanistan will need people like him and his friends if the country is ever to experience a future where basic human rights to food, shelter, health care and education are met. It will need people who have already made dedicated sacrifices for peace, believing in an Afghan adage that says “blood doesn’t wash away blood.”
Essentially, people in Afghanistan will need people in the United States to embrace this same teaching. We must express true sorrow, seek forgiveness, and show valor similar to that of the brave people insisting on human rights in Afghanistan today. Collectively, recognizing the terrible legacy of 9/11, we must agree: To counter terror, abolish war.
When 19 al-Qaeda hijackers flew four commercial airliners — one crashed following an attempt by heroic passengers to regain control, one plowed into the Pentagon and two rammed New York’s Twin Towers — it seemed the world sat glued to a million different TV screens. After the first report, I ran home as crowds stared at the news in bars, restaurants and bodegas. Reflected off those screens, it looked to me like New York City was filled with hundreds of burning towers.
The surreal moment had a truth. September 11 was instantly split by political ideology into many 9/11s. But the one that ended up defining the past 20 years was the right wing’s version. “Never forget” may be the slogan, but the right “never forgot” 9/11 because it never remembered it correctly. The national trauma of Ground Zero became a call to fight. Since they do not see people of color as citizens or even human, the “war on terror” transformed into a war on democracy.
The Two 9/11s
Here in New York, smoke rose from Ground Zero, carrying the ash of over two thousand people into the sky, and grieving families lit candles near photos of loved ones, buried under a mountain of debris. On the left, 9/11 was partly understood as the inevitable blowback of U.S. imperialism. On the right — and in many cases, in the center — it was portrayed as an attack on “Western civilization.”
Coming back from volunteering at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center where I helped organize relief supplies, I saw a man talking to a large crowd. “You can’t bomb the whole world,” he pointed above their heads, “and not expect it to come back at you.” Three months later, Seven Stories Press published 9-11 by Noam Chomsky, explaining the al-Qaeda attack as blowback from U.S. foreign policy. Chomsky said, “In much of the world the U.S. is regarded as the leading terrorist state.” In the pages, he cited U.S. state terrorism against Nicaragua, its support of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon that left 18,000 dead and the arms shipment to Turkey to slaughter Kurds. Chomsky explained 9/11 was caused by U.S. arming Islamic fundamentalists in the 1980s in order to create an “Afghan Trap” for the Soviet Union. When Osama bin Laden saw U.S. military bases in Saudi Arabia, he sought to overthrow the client state to create a pure Islamic caliphate. In 2004, bin Laden released a video saying inspiration came from the U.S. backing Israel’s invasion of Lebanon. He said, “While I was looking at these destroyed towers in Lebanon, it sparked in my mind that the tyrant should be punished with the same and that we should destroy towers in America.”
After the Twin Towers fell, the far right’s version of 9/11 crystallized; the enemy was not fundamentalists but people of color and non-Christians whose existence undermined the U.S. from within. The motif of the “internal enemy” deepened the further right one went. Some on the right blamed 9/11 on its victims, implying that many marginalized New Yorkers deserved to die.
“I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way — all of them who have tried to secularize America — I point the finger in their face and say, ‘you helped this happen,’” Rev. Jerry Falwell said on Pat Robertson’s show “The 700 Club” on September 13, 2001. Falwell saw terrified New Yorkers, covered in dust, through an ideological lens of Christian nationalism that made them into the “sinful” who caused this suffering.
His vision differed only in degree from neo-Nazi reactions to 9/11, monitored by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracked respect for al-Qaeda. In one post, Rocky Suhayda of the American Nazi Party said, “It’s a DISGRACE that in a population of at least 150 MILLION ‘White/Aryan’ Americans … we provide so FEW that are willing to do the same” — essentially calling for neo-Nazis to commit similar acts of terrorism.
For the settler-colonial complex, difference is danger, and enemies are everywhere. This type of thinking pervaded the right and center-right response to 9/11. It also led to Trump’s presidency. It led to the January 6 attempted coup at the Capitol. And it fuels the ongoing right-wing attempts to destroy democracy to save white supremacy.
Circle the Wagons
“Islam is peace,” President George W. Bush said. “These terrorists don’t represent peace. They represent war and terror.” The speech took place at the Islamic Center of Washington, D.C., two weeks after al-Qaeda killed nearly 3,000 people. The goal, according to the Bush administration, was to prevent vigilante violence against Muslim Americans and show what “compassionate conservativism” meant. On the ground, the FBI reported that in 2001, there were 481 hate crimes against Muslims, a wild spike compared to years before. Three people were killed. Many, many more were targeted, discriminated against in the workplace and in schools, and singled out for extra airport security. Racist violence not only targeted Muslims, but also racial and religious groups perceived to be Muslim.
This violence made the red in the American flag look like blood. 9/11 did not cause new racism but released what existed under the surface. The United States is a settler-colonial nation in which European colonizers attempted to replace Indigenous people through genocide, and enslaved millions of Africans to create massive wealth. Murder cleared space to erect a permanent state and a racial vocabulary to justify the violence. Each generation inherited the mythology through popular culture. The common theme was that Anglo-Saxon America had to be safeguarded against threats.
It’s in our language, like the phrase “circle the wagons” which comes from the seizing of Native land in the West by settlers who rode wagons and circled them when they faced resistance. It’s in Thomas Dixon’s 1902 book, The Leopard’s Spots, in which Black men are portrayed as animalistic brutes, and in the 2018 film, The Quiet Place, where dark snarling creatures hunt a white family. It’s in early American captivity narratives and Western film showing whelping, “bloodthirsty” Natives, a motif analyzed in Reel Injun. It’s in popular culture’s portrayal of Arabs as “savage” and Muslims as “terrorists” — from Aladdin to Iron Man. What one repeatedly sees in this mythology is the white American being portrayed as a victim of violence inflicted by people of color.
The right-wing settler-colonial complex made 9/11 more than a tragedy — it was a trigger of paranoia. It hit a core and sensitive cultural trauma, defined by Ron Eyerman in his 2019 bookMemory, Trauma, and Identity as “… a dramatic loss of identity and meaning, a tear in the social fabric, affecting a people who achieved some degree of cohesion.” Later, he explained that that trauma has to be “explained” through “public reflection” for later generations. The “tear in the social fabric” for the right was white bodies supposedly torn apart by Native people fighting the theft of their land, when outnumbered duringthe U.S.’s foundation. Added to that was the terror of enslaved Africans rising up in Nat Turner’s rebellion and in scores of smaller slave revolts. The settler colonial myth of people of color being violent to whites made 9/11 an existential crisis for conservatives, who continue to ignore how many working-class people of color died in the Twin Towers, like those memorialized in Puerto Rican poet Martin Espada’s poem “In Praise of Local 100.”
In the years that followed, history seemed to conspire to heighten that anxiety. President Obama was elected. During the campaign, fringe far right conspiracy theorists said he was not born in Hawaii but Kenya, and was a secret Muslim. Republican voters told then-candidate Sen. John McCain that Obama palled with domestic terrorists and one woman said he was “Arab.” Media personality and next president Donald Trump took “Birtherism” to new heights, demanding Obama present a birth certificate, stoking racial animus until finally relenting.
In the eyes of a colonial-settler mindset, Obama was the terrifying sign that whites would be “vulnerable” again and people of color would elect socialists to seize their property. Election night 2008 saw gun sales go off the charts. Over Obama’s two terms, pollster Cornell Belcher’s book, Black Man in the White House, tracked the rise of “racial aversion.” He said, “It was a predictable backlash to the first time the vast majority of whites — their political will did not have an outcome that they wanted.”
Fear and loathing bubbled under the surface, until again, Trump came in the 2015 presidential campaign and blasted it through the megaphone of his mouth. He warned of “rapist” Mexicans and Muslims as a “Trojan Horse,” and called for a travel ban on Muslims. He recycled 9/11 to stoke red state rage, saying, “There were people that were cheering, in the other side of New Jersey where you have large Arab populations, they were cheering as the World Trade Center came down.” It was a lie. It was believed anyway, though, because the right wing truly sees itself as a hapless victim of history.
The right’s use of 9/11 reached beyond Trump to the semi-intellectual sphere with Michael Anton’s essay “The Flight 93 Election” (referencing the plane where passengers fought the hijackers) in Claremont Review of Books. He warned that if Secretary of State Hillary Clinton won the 2016 election, Big Government would cannibalize civil society, open borders and flood the U.S. with hordes of “Third World foreigners” to lock in a permanent majority. (Unfortunately, Clinton’s agenda was in reality much more centrist.) Anton’s essay was a stylized take on the “white replacement” conspiracy found in the far right.
Again, the colonial-settler complex. Again, the fear of being overtaken. Again, the panic that the Natives and foreigners are winning. It led to panic at the 2018 midterms, when the initial members of The Squad (Representatives Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) were told by a weakened Trump to “go back” to the “totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.” Trump came hard at Representative Omar, a Somali American and Muslim, with a video splicing footage of the burning Twin Towers with a speech she had given.
And then Trump lost. Encouraged by the bitter ex-president and led to believe an election lost meant they lost America, known on the right as “white replacement” in which people of color outnumber whites and seize control. It is a nightmare fantasy that drove a ragtag coup was attempted on January 6, 2021. Officers were wounded. Wild-eyed right-wingers fought with police. For those who ransacked the Capitol and the many who supported them, it was the climactic battle of 9/11.
Woke Empire
Twenty years after September 11, President Joe Biden removed the last of the U.S. military from Afghanistan and the far right had an interesting reaction. The American far right praised the Taliban. On Telegram, an encrypted app used by neo-Nazis, cheers poured in for the Islamic fundamentalists as one post said, “If white men in the West had the same courage as the Taliban, we would not be ruled by Jews currently.” It is a similar sentiment to the one expressed by the far right when al-Qaeda first rammed planes in the towers and Rocky Suhayda said in response, “’White/Aryan’ Americans … we provide so FEW that are willing to do the same.” On the other side of the Atlantic, the European far right warned of an invasion of refugees from the collapse of the U.S. puppet government in Kabul.
The far right praised terrorists while paramedics, firefighters, construction workers and military tunneled through a mountain of rubble to rescue desperate people on 9/11. They pulled survivors out. They breathed in toxic dust that destroyed lungs. Some died of cancer.
They did that dangerous work in spirit of humanism. It is the same spirit that moved pilots and humanitarian workers to get fleeing Afghans onto planes as the Taliban closed in. It is the same spirit that drove the tireless work of activists over the past two decades. It is a vision that rejects the white-supremacy-structured foundation on which this country was built. The social movements that changed the face of the country ultimately make an appeal to our greater humanity, even if they begin with defending a specific racial group or gender or class. Racism still exists. The legacy of it is still seen today. But social movements are chipping away at that foundation, more and more each day.
The far right hates what the U.S. is becoming. It is possessed by a settler-colonial vision to protect a purity that never existed. The rest of us, the vast majority, have to take the true lesson of 9/11, during the crises that will come — climate change, more attempted coups by Republicans, economic meltdowns — to do what the first responders did and keep risking ourselves to make sure everyone gets out alive.
But it was not only Black Americans who were familiar with the endemic terror built into the machinery of white supremacy, capitalism, and empire, but those overseas who the empire for decades sought to subdue, dominate, and destroy. They knew there is no moral difference between those who fire Hellfire and cruise missiles or pilot militarized drones, obliterating wedding parties, village gatherings or families, and suicide bombers. They knew there is no moral difference between those who carpet-bomb North Vietnam or southern Iraq and those who fly planes into buildings. In short, they knew the evil that spawned evil. America was not attacked because the hijackers hated us for our values.
In the twenty years since September 11, 2001, our government has established dozens of laws, policies and programs ostensibly designed to prevent additional attacks on our nation. Some of those post-9/11 measures—such as increasing airport security and improving communication between federal agencies regarding potential threats—were reasonable, legal and successful in making us safer. But many other measures were as ineffective as they were unconstitutional. They undermined civil liberties, violated civil rights and harmed countless people—particularly Muslims in America—in the name of national security.
The first time I heard about 9/11 was on the radio at a restaurant in Afghanistan, where I was working as a research assistant. I wasn’t following any news, and at that time in Afghanistan there was no TV or internet. People used radios to listen to the outside world.
I’m from Yemen, and I couldn’t imagine a skyscraper 110 floors tall. In fact, it was the first time I heard that such buildings even existed. The tallest building in Sana’a was 25 floors — that was a skyscraper by Yemeni standards.
At that time, Afghanistan was a mix of a lot of the past and a little of the present, mostly represented by cars. The land, damaged buildings, scraps of war machines that harvested countless lives, and general destruction and casualties already told a brutal and sad tale of Afghanistan’s past and what would shape its future.
Attack
When I heard on the radio that airplanes had flown into buildings in the United States, I couldn’t fully grasp the magnitude of the attack, what it meant, or how many victims there would be. The United States was all the way around the world and didn’t have anything to do with me.
Most Afghan people, along with the foreigners who lived in Afghanistan, had no idea what had happened either. Life continued as usual, until suddenly word got out that a Saudi charity organisation that worked in Afghanistan had received instructions to immediately liquidate and distribute everything it had then leave.
My friend was working for the organisation so I agreed to help him and take some aid, logistics, and medicine to a nearby hospital. We then planned to leave Afghanistan in the organisation’s car.
It never once crossed my mind that 9/11 would impact me. I was 18 years old and traveling outside of Yemen for the first time. I knew very little about the West. I didn’t really know the difference between the United States and the United Nations.
My dream was simply to finish my mission, get back to Yemen, and leave to one of the Gulf countries to finish my education and work there.
Classified by the government
Instead, I was kidnapped in Afghanistan and sold to the Americans. They said I was an “Al Qaeda general”, and the United States government classified me as an “Al Qaeda commander” and a “9/11 insider”.
I don’t consider myself any different from the many Muslims around the world who must live under the war on terror. But I do consider myself fortunate compared to those who have lost their lives, lost their families, or lost their limbs as collateral damage in ground wars, air strikes, and drone strikes.
I was tortured and imprisoned for almost half of my life at Guantanamo and my life changed forever. I still live with the stigma of Guantanamo. And this past hinders my daily life in Serbia, where I have been placed in the detainee “resettlement” programme, and where I am still treated as a terrorist even though I have been cleared of any crime.
But I appreciate that I’m alive.
Turning point in history
9/11 was a turning point in history. It accelerated the war on Islam and Muslims and on those who understand or sympathise with us. For the last two decades, we have faced state-sponsored crimes against us in the name of the war on terror.
9/11 was also presented as the beginning of history. But people forget that the United States was deeply involved in what happened in Afghanistan in the 1980s. There it paid Muslims to fight a proxy war against the Soviet Union which helped lead to its downfall.
The current US policy towards Muslims and Islam leaves an especially bitter taste if you realise that, thanks to Muslims, the US won against the Soviets in Afghanistan without a single American life being lost.
9/11 was a product of United States foreign policy and a long-standing conflict between the US and al-Qaeda. But it has been employed and misused against Muslims more broadly all over the world.
It served as a framework which has enabled countless senseless deaths, and US and NATO invasion and aggression in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other parts of the Middle East and Asia, as well as across Africa.
It has also been waged against Muslims who live in the United States, UK, and Europe. This has been done through counter-extremism and counter-terrorism policies that profile people based on their religion and undermine justice.
Justice
But despite what I see, and what I’ve been through as a result of 9/11, I still believe in justice.
The innocent people whose lives were lost on 9/11, and their families, deserve justice. I don’t think that the 9/11 victims or their families would approve of the killing, kidnapping, and torture of people around the world that has followed from an already terrible event.
In fact, I don’t think any member of the 9/11 families would want other innocent people to suffer and to experience the pain they felt from having a loved one taken from them in such an unjust way. I imagine the first responders, the firefighters, the police officers, the medics, and all the others who were lost on 9/11 would not support the distortion of justice, the sacrificing of values, and the taking of innocent lives to be done in their names.
Let us remember that those who lost their lives on 9/11 and their families are not the only victims of 9/11. Over a period of twenty years, there are now victims in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Guantanamo, and many countries around the world. Countless people have suffered silently at the loss of innocent lives. They experience untold 9/11s every single day, with no country to defend them or media to cover their stories. They deserve justice too.
To that end, I’ve recently joined CAGE in its global campaign to do exactly that. The International Witness Campaign, which I’m proud to support, will aim to ask the questions that we must answer: how do we truly arrive at justice?
Every single life is sacred. I pray every day for justice and peace for all humanity.
Okay, okay, let’s all cool our jets here for a minute. I know we’re all worked up about the twentieth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, and that’s all well and good. But let’s not let our emotions cloud our vision and let today’s commemorations cause us to forget the real horror we must all remain focused on: the Capitol riot this past January.
It is true that losing nearly 3,000 American lives to weaponized passenger jets was pretty bad, but I think we can all agree that this pales in comparison to the earth-shattering terror we all experienced when watching footage of wingnuts wander aimlessly around the Capitol Building for a few hours.
Serious experts agree.
In a July appearance on MSNBC’s ReidOut with Joy Reid, former Bush strategist Matthew Dowd said he felt the Capitol riot was “much worse” than 9/11 and that this is the “most perilous point in time” since the beginning of the American Civil War.
“To me, though there was less loss of life on January 6, January 6 was worse than 9/11, because it’s continued to rip our country apart and get permission for people to pursue autocratic means, and so I think we’re in a much worse place than we’ve been,” Dowd said. “I think we’re in the most perilous point in time since 1861 in the advent of the Civil War.”
“I do too,” Reid replied.
Not to be outdone, Lincoln Project co-founder Steve Schmidt cited Dowd’s claim but added that not only was January 6 worse than 9/11, but it was actually going to kill more Americans somehow, even counting all those killed in the US wars which ensued from the 9/11 attacks.
“He couldn’t be more right,” Schmidt said at a town hall for the Lincoln Project. “The 1/6 attack for the future of the country was a profoundly more dangerous event than the 9/11 attacks. And in the end, the 1/6 attacks are likely to kill a lot more Americans than were killed in the 9/11 attacks, which will include the casualties of the wars that lasted 20 years following.”
Popular #Resistance pundit Majid Padellan tweeted back in February, “I am traumatized all over again while watching this video recap. Don’t try to tell me January 6th was NOT worse than 9/11.”
“I would like to see January 6th burned into the American mind as firmly as 9/11 because it was that scale of a shock to the system,” said Washington Post columnist George Will on ABC’s “This Week” roundtable back in May.
Huffington Post’s senior White House correspondent S.V. Dáte asserted on Twitter that this year’s Capitol riot was worse than the September 11 attacks because “The 9/11 terrorists and Osama bin Laden never threatened the heart of the American experiment. The 1/6 terrorists and Donald Trump absolutely did exactly that. Trump continues that effort today.”
Dáte added that the events of 1/6 were “1000 percent worse” than if 9/11 hijackers had succeeded in crashing a Boeing 757 into the Capitol Building twenty years ago.
So that settles it, then: QAnoners meandering around a government building is far, far worse than thousands of people being killed in fiery explosions.
It’s a good thing we’ve got such sane, level-headed people on such prominent platforms instructing us on how to think about important events, because otherwise this perspective might never have even occurred to us. Especially since the FBI found no evidence that Trump and his allies were involved in coordinating the 1/6 riot and very little evidence of any centralized planning of any kind, and since we now know that the only person claimed to have been killed by the rioters actually died of natural causes, and since many other claims about the Capitol riot have been soundly debunked.
So now that we’ve cleared that up, let’s not let 9/11 stop us from screaming about 1/6 for all eternity, as loud as our lungs will allow. It’s important we remain rational here.
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When I arrived at my office at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji on the morning of 12 September 2001 (9/11, NY Time), I was oblivious to reality.
I had dragged myself home to bed a few hours earlier at 2am as usual, after another long day working on our students’ Wansolwara Online website providing coverage of the Fiji general election.
One day after being sworn in as the country’s fifth real (elected) prime minister, it seemed that Laisenia Qarase was playing another dirty trick on Mahendra Chaudhry’s Labour Party, which had earned the constitutional right to be included in the multi-party government supposed to lead the country back to democracy.
Stepping into my office, I encountered a colleague. He looked wild-eyed and said: “It’s the end of the world.”
Naively, I replied, thinking of the 1987 military coups, “Yes, how can legality and constitutionality be cast aside so blatantly yet again?”
“No, not Fiji politics,” he said. “That’s nothing. I mean New York. Terrorists have destroyed the financial heart of the Western world.”
It was a chilling moment, comparable to how I had felt as a 17-year-old forestry science trainee in a logging camp at Kaingaroa Forest the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated — 22 November 1963.
Wansolwara newsroom
Over the next few hours, it seemed that half the Laucala campus descended on our Wansolwara newsroom to watch the latest BBC, TVNZ one and Fiji TV One coverage of the shocking and devastating tragedy.
While a handful of student journalists struggled to provide coverage of local angles — such as the tightening of security around the US Embassy in Suva and shock among the Laucala intelligentsia — most students remained glued to the TV, stunned into immobility by the suicide jetliner terrorists.
Inevitably, global jingoism and xenophobia followed, the assaults on Sikhs merely because they an “Arab look”, the attacks on mosques — in Fiji copies of the Koran were burned — and the abuse directed towards Afghan refugees were par for the course.
Freedom of speech in the United States also quickly became a casualty of this new “war on terrorism”. Columnists were fired for their critical views, television host Bill Maher was denounced by the White House, Doonesbury cartoonist Gary Trudeau dropped his “featherweight Bush” cartoons and so-called “unpatriotic” songs were dropped from radio playlists. Wrote Maureen Dowd of The New York Times:
Even as the White House preaches tolerance toward Muslims and Sikhs, it is practising intolerance, signalling that anyone who challenges the leaders of embattled America is cynical, political and – isn’t this the subtext? – unpatriotic.
But while much of the West lined up as political parrots alongside the United States, ready to exact a terrible vengeance, contrasting perspectives were apparent in many developing nations.
In the Pacific, for example, while people empathised with the survivors of the terrible toll — 2977 people were killed (including the 125 at the Pentagon), 19 hijackers committed murder-suicide, and more than 6000 people injured — there was often a more critical view of the consequences of American foreign policy and a sense of dread about the future.
Twin Towers reflections
Less than a week after the Twin Towers tragedy, I asked my final-year students to compile some notes recalling the circumstances of when they heard the news of the four aircraft slamming into the World Trade Centre Twin Towers and the Pentagon (one plane was taken over by the passengers and it dived into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania) and their responses.
One, a mature age student from Fiji who had worked for several years as a radio journalist, said:
I was in bed and woke up about 2.30am. I have a habit of having the BBC running on radio and, half-asleep, I caught the news being broadcast. I pulled myself out of bed and tuned into BBC on Sky TV. The second plane had just hit the second tower, and I ended staying up the rest of the night to watch the unfolding events.
On his impressions, he warned about scapegoats and the media:
The relevance to us here in the Pacific is that terrorists can strike anywhere to get revenge. This conflict could evolve into war, and wars affect everyone. Americans already think Osama bin Laden is the terrorist. Where is the evidence? Americans are looking to get someone quickly, and the media is leading the way.
Another student wrote:
Good, they [US] paid dearly for trying to intervene in Muslim countries … Bin Laden is portrayed as the culprit even though it is not clear who did it. The media is portraying the whole Muslim world as responsible, but actually this is not the case.
A practical joke?
Recalled one:
I was sleeping and my mother woke me up at 6.30am to tell me the news. I was shocked and, still sleepy, I thought my mother was doing one of her practical jokes to get me out of bed … If there is World War Three, it will have a big impact on the Pacific.
America still has some form of control over various Pacific Island countries, and once again it will recruit Pacific Islanders. Pacific Islands are relatively weak and still trying to be developed. Another hiccup could send our economies t the dogs.
Yet another:
I was at home having breakfast, listening to the news on Bula 100FM. My first reaction was disbelief, horror … Ethically, there is a need to remember the people involved and the amount of bloodshed and death. It would be necessary to censor material that would be emotionally upsetting.
One student was
really surprised to see TVNZ instead of the usual Chinese CCTV. The sound was mute so I couldn’t really get what was being said. I was about to turn it off when they showed the South Tower of the World Trade Centre collapse. I thought it was a short piece from the movie Independence Day.
Sad, it may seem, but the first thing I thought about as a journalist was that reporters will have a field day … Phrases such as “historical day the world over” and “America under siege” popped up in my head as possible headlines.
I got out my notebook and began writing down the number of people estimated to have died, the extent of the damage, an excerpts from President Bush’s speech. Practically anything that involves the US also affects many people throughout the world.
Inevitably, some commentators began drawing parallels between the terrorism in New York in mid-September 2001 at one end of the continuum of hate and rogue businessman and George Speight’s brief terrorist rule in Fiji during mid-2000 at the other end.
Terrorism as a political tool
Politics associate professor Scott MacWilliam, for example, highlighted how terrorism becomes a political tool deployed by a nation state to support its foreign and domestic policy objectives. He pointed out that many of the fundamentalist groups which now carried out terrorism were “nurtured, trained, financed and incorporated” into the Western security apparatus.
One might ask what had this terrible urban graveyard created by fanaticism got to do with the South Pacific. In a sense, there is a disturbing relationship.
Politics in the region, especially at that time, was increasingly being determined by terrorism, particularly in Melanesia, and much of it by the state. And with this situation comes a greater demand on the region’s media and journalists, for more training and professionalism.
At the time of the 9/11 tragedy, Dr David Robie was head of journalism at the University of the South Pacific. This article has been extracted from a keynote speech that he made at the inaugural conference of the Pacific Islands Media Association (PIMA), “Navigating the Future”, at Auckland University of Technology on 5-6 October 2001. The full address was published by Pacific Journalism Review, No. 8.
