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Category: 9/11

  • Messianic Failure: Pursuing the GWOT Jabberwock

    Anniversaries can provide occasions for reflection and deep consideration.  Past errors and misjudgements can be considered soberly; historical distance provides perspective.  Mature reflections may be permitted.  But they can also serve the opposite purpose: to cake, cloak and mask the record.

    The gooey name GWOT, otherwise known as the Global War on Terrorism, is some two decades old, and it has revealed little by way of benefit for anybody other than military industrialists, hate preachers and jingoes.  For its progenitors in the administration of President George W. Bush, motivated by the attacks of September 11, 2001 on US soil, few of its aims were achieved.

    The central feature to the war, which deserves its place of failure alongside such disastrously misguided concepts as the war on drugs, was its school boy incoherence.  It remained, and to an extent remains, a war against tactics, a misguided search reminiscent of the hunt for Lewis Carroll’s nonsense beast, the Jabberwock.  As with any such wars, it demands mendacity, flimsy evidence if, in fact, it needs any evidence at all.

    This perception was critical in placing the US, and its allies, upon a military footing that demanded false connections (a fictitious link of cooperation between Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and al-Qaeda), false capabilities (Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction) and an exaggeration of the threat to US security (all of the above).

    With such evaluations of terroristic potential, a secular, domestic murderer such as Saddam could be transformed into a global threat armed with weapons of mass destruction, neither proposition being true as the attacks on 9/11 were executed.  In this hot house fantasy, the Iraqi leader was merely another pilot willing to steer a plane into an American target.

    This narrative was sold, and consumed, by a vast number of press houses and media outlets, who proved indispensable in promoting the GWOT-Jabberwock crusade.  Calculated amnesia and hand washing has taken place since then, pinning blame on the standard crew of neoconservatives, various Republicans and New York Times reporter Judith Miller.  “It’s been forgotten this was actually a business-wide consensus,” Matt Taibbi points out, “which included the enthusiastic participation of a blue-state intelligentsia.”

    War sceptics such as Phil Donahue and Jesse Ventura were removed from MSNBC while war cheerleaders thickened the airwaves with ghoulish delight.  The New York Times ran sympathetic columns and reviews for the war case, praising such absurd works as Kenneth M. Pollack’s The Threatening Storm. “The only prudent and realistic course of action left to the United States,” wrote the grave Pollack, “is to mount a full-scale invasion of Iraq to smash the Iraqi armed forces, depose Saddam’s regime and rid the country of weapons of mass destruction.”

    The New Yorker also joined in the pro-war festivities.  David Remnick made his case in “Making a Case” by praising Pollack and dismissing containment as “a hollow pursuit” that would be “the most dangerous option of all.”  Jeffrey Goldberg, now at The Atlantic, was even more unequivocal in a staggeringly inexpert contribution headlined, “The Great Terror.” On his own hunt for the Jabberwock, Goldberg interviewed alleged terrorist detainees in a prison operated by the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, an anti-Saddam Kurdish group in Iraq’s northern Kurdish area.  Having been permitted to interview the prisoners by the Union’s intelligence service (no conflict of interest there), Goldberg was informed that Saddam Hussein’s own spooks had “joint control, with al-Qaeda operatives, over Ansar al-Islam [a local jihadist group]”; that the Iraqi leader “hosted a senior leader of Al Qaeda in Baghdad in 1992”; that members of Al Qaeda escaping Afghanistan had “been secretly brought into the territory controlled by Ansar al-Islam” and that Iraq’s intelligence service had “smuggled conventional weapons, and possibly even chemical and biological weapons, into Afghanistan.”  And so rests the case for the prosecution.

    In March 2003, Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting examined 393 on-camera sources who featured in nightly news stories on Iraq across a range of programs – ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News and PBS’s NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.  Of those 267 were from the United States; of the US official sources, only Democratic Senator Edward Kennedy from Massachusetts, registered his doubts.  Even then, he could hardly be said to be a firebrand contrarian, telling NBC Nightly News that he worried about exit plans, the extent of US troop losses and “how long we’re going to be stationed there”.

    Many of these outlets would be the same who obsessed about President Donald Trump’s attacks upon them as peddlers of “fake news” during his time in office.  Trump, drip-fed on conspiracy theories and fictions, knew who he was talking to.

    The security propagandists have not done much better.  With pious conviction, the vast security apparatus put in place to monitor threats, the warrantless surveillance regime exposed by Edward Snowden in 2013, and the persistent interventions in the Middle East, have all been seen as beneficial.  “Terrorism of many sots continues domestically and internationally,” claims Michael Leiter, former director of the National Counterterrorism Centre, “but the data is unmistakable that in most cases – and especially in the United States – it is both manageable and not nearly of the scale feared in 2001.”

    A. Trevor Thrall and Erik Goepner advance a rather different proposition. “Even if one believes American efforts have made the nation marginally safer, the United States could have achieved far greater improvements in safety and security at far less cost through other means.”

    The issue of what is marginal is a point of contention.  Former chiefs of the Department of Homeland Security, a monster created in direct response to the 9/11 attacks, are guarded in their assessments.  Bush’s Secretary Michael Chertoff admits to being “hesitant” in saying “we are safer, or less”.  He prefers focusing on scale.  “We haven’t had an attack of that scale since 9/11, and we’ve also been very good about keeping dangerous people out of the country.”  Alas, domestic threats had emerged, notably on the Right, while jihadi sympathisers lurk.

    Janet Napolitano, who occupied the office under the Obama administration, waffles in her reading.  “Are there some things that we’re safer on now than we were on 9/11?  Absolutely.  Are there new risks that have evolved or multiplied or grown since 9/11?  Absolutely.   To put it shortly, on some things, we’re definitely safer.”  Napolitano is up with a jargon that says nothing at all: “risks are not static”; the environment is “constantly changing”. “DHS needs to continue to be agile and to adapt.”

    The smorgasbord of modern terrorism, a good deal of it nourished by cataclysmic US-led interventions, is richer than ever.  “We have more terrorists today than we did on 9/11,” Elizabeth Neumann, DHS assistant secretary for counterterrorism during the Trump administration, told a Senate panel last month.  “That’s very sobering, as a counterterrorism person.”  Preparing the grounds for the imminent exit from Afghanistan, President Joe Biden reasoned that keeping US troops in the country as a permanent counter-terrorist force was no longer a tenable proposition.  Terrorism as a threat had “become more dispersed, metastasising around the globe”.  The folly of pursuing the GWOT jabberwock shows no sign of abating.

    The post Messianic Failure: Pursuing the GWOT Jabberwock first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Writing Was on the Wall in Afghanistan Years Ago

    An illustration in shades of blue shows a woman in a hijab looking sadly over a city from a rooftop as fighter jets fly over. In the corner, a yellow sun rises.

    This is part of a series of reported essays describing how 9/11 and the “war on terror” that followed changed the lives of people outside the United States.

    I was 9 years old, living in a small Austrian town on the day of the 9/11 attacks in New York. Even as my Afghan refugee parents were glued to the news, I was impatient to watch my favorite Japanese anime show, “Dragon Ball Z,” a classic tale about good conquering evil. It was only when that was canceled and replaced by footage of smoldering towers that I was introduced to a man named Osama bin Laden, who was said to be hiding in my family’s home country. His name didn’t sound Afghan, but I overheard my father lamenting that the presence of this man meant the United States was surely going to attack Afghanistan. 

    The next morning and for days on end, as the only Afghan child in my school, I was met with a barrage of questions that quickly turned aggressive. Starting with my teacher’s query, “Emran, you’re from Afghanistan, do you know why they did it?” to taunts from my classmates about how my “terrorist” and “Taliban” relatives were going to be nuked. 

    In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the invasion of Afghanistan was so popular in the United States that it might have felt inevitable. A Gallup poll from October 2001 found that 88% of Americans supported it. But watching the airstrikes on television, it felt like World War III was coming to my country. Many of our close relatives still lived in Kabul and the northern countryside. It was the era before smartphones and widespread instant messaging, and we went days, sometimes weeks, without hearing from them. 

    As my parents and I watched an elderly Afghan man telling a television reporter in his native Pashto how he’d been arrested and sexually abused by U.S. soldiers, my mother wept in fear of what was to come. 

    I decided then that I wanted to bear witness to this war. I wanted to examine what others wanted to keep secret. It was another 13 years before I would begin traveling regularly to my home country as an independent journalist, absorbing and documenting everything I could. My early stories, published in the Austrian and German press, focused on the political intrigue and backroom deals around the Afghan presidential elections. But when I traveled to the countryside, where nearly three-quarters of the population lives, what I found was far, far darker. 

    This is where the “war on terror” was being waged, not in the capital, Kabul. In villages across large parts of the country, stories of torture and night raids by U.S. and U.S.-trained forces were legion and airstrikes were almost daily occurrences. Almost every family I met when I was traveling through rural provinces in the north, south and east between 2014 and 2021 had stories of how the war they called the “American war” had turned them against the Americans and, ultimately, toward the Taliban. 

    This is not what Americans were hearing on the nightly news. In the United States, the longest war dragged on for 20 years, largely forgotten by most of the public. They were not hearing about the ravages of the war in the countryside and how it was radicalizing Afghans in village after village, bloating the ranks of the Taliban. That might be why so many Americans were surprised by how quickly the Taliban were able to make advances and ultimately take control of Kabul and the seat of the Afghan government. 

    But the writing was on the wall for anyone who wanted to see it. For well over a decade now, if you drove a short distance from the provincial capitals of Jalalabad, Asadabad, Khost or Kunduz, you’d find yourself deep inside Taliban country. In my experience reporting there, almost every family has a story about how U.S. and Afghan special forces have killed civilians with impunity. 

    Several small buildings dot a valley. A mountain rises behind the rural town.
    Paktia province, Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, nearly three-quarters of the population lives in rural areas. Credit: Emran Feroz

    Noor ul-Hadi, from a village near Jalalabad, told me about repeated night raids by U.S. forces in 2012 and 2013. Even though his father worked for the local election complaints commission and was close to the government, his uncle and cousin were killed in one of the raids. When the family requested an investigation, insisting they were not Taliban members, they were ignored. 

    “One result of such massacres is that even Afghans who support the government turn away from it,” he told me. 

    And of course, it wasn’t just the night raids. Afghanistan has the unfortunate distinction of being the most drone-bombed country in the world. When I realized that no authorities, neither American nor Afghan, were keeping track of the deaths from these attacks, I started a virtual drone memorial to account for as many civilian victims as I could. 

    Khost, a province bordering Pakistan’s North Waziristan, was the heart of the U.S. drone war under President Barack Obama. Pasta Khan, a 55-year-old nomad from the Kuchi tribe, lost six members of his family, including his father and all of his brothers, in a 2015 drone strike. He told me that the men had been returning from a funeral for a relative just across the border in Pakistan when a drone hit their trucks, killing 14 civilians. 

    Pasta Khan sits cross-legged on a bed.
    Pasta Khan, a Kuchi nomad from Afghanistan’s Khost province, lost six family members in a 2015 U.S. drone strike. He said they were returning from a funeral for a relative across the border in Pakistan. Credit: Emran Feroz

    Yet after airstrikes or military operations killed civilians, the U.S.-backed government in Kabul offered little in the way of support or redress. “They never come, they never help,” Khan told me. “Is being killed by a suicide attack worse than being killed by a drone?” It was often members of the Taliban who showed up to offer support. (The U.S. maintained that the 14 were insurgents; an investigation was inconclusive.)

    The more time I spent in Afghanistan, the more clear it was that the benefits of the American occupation were visible only in the big cities and Kabul in particular. There, Afghans could enjoy fancy coffee shops with $1 cappuccinos, but in the rest of the country, most Afghans lived on less than a dollar a day. Even as investigative journalists and U.S. oversight authorities uncovered how Afghanistan was awash in corruption and how billions of tax dollars spent by Washington contributed to the graft, the Afghan government continued to ally with brutal warlords and drug barons and senior Afghan officials and their families siphoned money into luxury homes in Dubai, crippling any promise of building a functioning society. 

    Inside Afghanistan, however, there was little appetite for exposing this kind of open corruption. While critics of the Taliban were killed with car bombs, critics of the Afghan government and the U.S. war on terror were also not safe. Last year, I received death threats on social media and a warning that I could meet the same fate as my uncle, a prominent public intellectual and government critic who was killed under mysterious circumstances in 2019.

    On each of my visits to Afghanistan, I saw and wrote about how the American war had made it relatively easy for the Taliban to recruit rural Afghans, despite the grim memories of their previous rule. Instead of wiping out terrorism and ushering in a new era of democracy, the staggering corruption, the terror of airstrikes and the horrific abuses by U.S. and Afghan soldiers were radicalizing tens of thousands of Afghans.

    With the dramatic return to power of the Taliban in August, I don’t have a lot of hope at this moment. Like so many other Afghans around the world, I’ve spent weeks trying to help my friends and family members who are stuck in Kabul and other parts of the country. Some of them are desperately trying to leave with their families; others, perhaps daunted by the obstacles to leaving, face an uncertain future under Taliban rule. They all feel abandoned by President Ashraf Ghani and his coterie of political elites who fled the country after looting it for years. While they have found safe havens in the United Arab Emirates, millions of ordinary Afghans who don’t want to live under the Taliban are stranded. 

    Since the last American warplane left Kabul, I’ve been thinking of all the rural Afghans I’ve met. If the withdrawal of U.S. troops brings an end to the daily terror the war has inflicted on them, I know they will be relieved. Of course, with groups like ISIS-K on the rise, it’s ironic to see the United States coordinating with the Taliban, the very enemy it spent over $1.5 trillion fighting for the last 20 years. But with the recent drone strikes after the deadly ISIS-K attack on the Kabul airport, it’s a reminder that the era of terror from the skies might not be over yet. And that’s a reminder to plan my next trip to Afghanistan. 

    This essay was edited by Anjali Kamat and Andrew Donohue and copy edited by Nikki Frick.

    Emran Feroz can be reached at emran_feroz@hotmail.com. Follow him on Twitter: @emran_feroz.

    The Writing Was on the Wall in Afghanistan Years Ago is a story from Reveal. Reveal is a registered trademark of The Center for Investigative Reporting and is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization.

    This post was originally published on Reveal.

  • Fallujah: My Lost Hometown

    An illustration in shades of blue and yellow shows drones turning into birds over a small town.

    This is part of a series of reported essays describing how 9/11 and the “war on terror” that followed changed the lives of people outside the United States.

    It was the first day of summer vacation in France, and I was unusually melancholic for an 8-year-old. I lived in a little town outside Paris and all my friends had left to visit their families in the provinces. The morning was blue, unusually cold and felt decidedly lonesome. I decided to approach my sullen father with a question about Iraq, the country he had fled in the ’70s as a dissident: “Baba, do we even have a family?”

    Sensing my dismay, my father smiled, took out a piece of paper and began writing down names. He didn’t stop until he’d filled the page with nearly a hundred names of family members: Auday, Mazen, Riad, Nahla, Soad, Hasna. … I practiced saying them. One name in particular stood out to me: Fallujah. My father had circled the word and written right next to it, “our hometown.” 

    I carried the page with me, reading and rereading it until I had memorized as many names as I could. My father told me that every one of these people knew my name and had seen photographs of me. We hadn’t spoken to them because Iraq was at war with Iran and telephone calls were rare. 

    I was struck by the paradox of my situation: born in Paris when really, I belonged to Fallujah. 

    One summer day in 1988, we finally received that long-awaited phone call: The war was over! A year later, my mother, my sister and I found ourselves on an Iraqi Airways plane bound for Baghdad, then Fallujah. 

    Of course, it’s hard to say the name Fallujah today in Europe or the United States without instantly conjuring up images of war, destruction and battle-hardened anti-American jihadis. What does the world know of Fallujah besides its destruction by U.S. forces in 2004 and its 2014 conquest by the Islamic State group? From my experience, almost nothing. But that empty space is where my history and my family’s history reside. 

    Fallujah is the city where my parents were born, a clean, green city bordered by the Euphrates – or Al-Furat – River, after which I was named. It wasn’t as exciting as Baghdad, a much larger and wealthier city, but its greatest charm was the world of family it opened up. During my first visit, it was exhilarating to meet aunts and uncles and cousins in the flesh, people whose lives I’d only been able to imagine until then. After years of feeling isolated in France, as one of the only Iraqi families we knew, I was overwhelmed to discover that I belonged to a warm and loving community of more people than I could count. 

    Feurat Alani and his sister sit atop a car parked on the banks of a river. Three uncles stand around them.
    Feurat Alani (second from right) and his sister on the banks of the Euphrates River in Fallujah with his uncles in 1989. Credit: Courtesy of Feurat Alani

    1989 was a year of peace, sadly an anomaly in Iraq’s recent history. In the years that followed, the lightness and joy of my first visit began to fade. When I returned in 1992, an unstoppable United Nations Security Council-imposed embargo had just begun to set in, and by 1995, the weight of the sanctions hung heavy over Iraq. Fallujah began to fold in on itself. Everyone was hungry. More and more of my cousins were dropping out of school to work in the local markets. When I left Iraq at the end of that visit, I didn’t know if or when I would return. I wanted to just be a teenager and focus on my life in France.

    The turning point came on Sept. 11, 2001. I remember the shock and grief watching the news on that fateful Tuesday. I remember phone calls of disbelief and tears from my cousins in Iraq. But as Bush administration officials wasted no time in building their case for invading Iraq, a slow horror set in about what this emerging narrative – however fraudulent – could mean for my hometown. It was this narrative, coming out of 9/11 and daily conversations with my father, that pushed me back to Iraq and into journalism. 

    My father had fled Iraq after being imprisoned by Saddam Hussein for spreading Communist ideas and building an opposition to his authoritarian rule. During the lead-up to the war, we talked about his activism in Iraq and his fears and hopes for the future every day. I knew I had to go back myself and tell stories about what Iraqis were going through. 

    And so for a decade, I made Baghdad my base and reported across the country for a range of French and international outlets on everything from the fallout of the U.S. invasion to the rise of the Islamic State group. But my most powerful stories – and life lessons – came from Fallujah and my family.  

    The horror of reporting on bodies buried in the local football stadium after the deadly battles of Fallujah in April and November 2004 was surpassed only by recognizing some of the names on the makeshift tombstones. Three of my cousins died during the fighting and are buried there. 

    Headstones fill a sandy lot. A brick wall stands at one end.
    The Martyrs’ Cemetery was previously a football stadium in Fallujah. Credit: Yvon Le Gall

    A fourth cousin had joined the insurgency but was caught and imprisoned in Abu Ghraib and Camp Bucca. When he was released a year later, he decided to enroll in the newly created Iraqi police force. He was killed a week later by al-Qaida in Iraq, which called him a traitor for joining any part of the U.S.-installed Iraqi government. 

    As I was trying to make sense of the senseless violence and the sectarian nightmare that was unfolding in Iraq, I learned that my uncles, all of whom had been in the Iraqi military, had joined different sections of the anti-American insurgency: Salafi, Sufi, nationalist, independent. I was initially surprised by the diversity of ideology in a city that had always seemed homogenous on its face, essentially an army town, which in Saddam’s time also meant a Sunni town. But mostly, I was uncomfortable with how the fighting had changed my uncles. One of them, a decorated veteran of the war with Iran, reminded me that resistance to an occupying force was legitimate under international law. But I also saw the rage that swept across his face each time an American military convoy passed through the rubble of our hometown. It terrified me.

    This is when my father planned his first visit to post-invasion Iraq. A few days after he arrived, he ran into an old friend he hadn’t seen in 30 years at a cafe they both used to love in Baghdad. Minutes after the encounter, two young men walked in and shot his friend, killing him on the spot. We later learned that the friend had been suspected of working with the Americans. My father left Iraq soon after and, after three decades of holding out hope of returning and playing a role in his country, applied for French citizenship.

    By 2007, I could no longer ignore the stories I’d been hearing about an uptick in the number of birth defects among babies born in Fallujah. My friend Abu Yunis, a former football player who became my fixer and guide in the city, told me about babies dying soon after birth and deformed children growing up in hiding. His descriptions were so fantastical that I had struggled to believe him. But after he started sending me photographs, I started investigating the phenomenon for French television. I interviewed Iraqi families, medical researchers, doctors, scientists, weapons experts, as well as Marines who had fought in Fallujah. Doctors reported a sharp uptick in birth defects after the invasion. No one knew exactly what had caused it, but one theory was that toxic contamination caused by the war might be responsible. One doctor in Fallujah told me she was so overwhelmed by seeing 1 in 5 babies being born with deformities that her only advice to people in the city was to stop having children. 

    Even after most American troops left the country, policies the United States put in place – like the disbanding of the army, the de-Baathification of government institutions, and the imposition of a sectarian political system – continue to haunt Iraq. There’s no other way of putting it: The war has left Iraqis a legacy of death. Each year, the Fallujah I knew and loved slips further away. But this history, as bloody and painful as it is, matters and should not be forgotten. There’s no official count of how many Iraqis have been killed since the U.S. invasion began. There’s no memorial for all the Iraqis who’ve died terrible, violent deaths. Or for those who’ve died of hunger or disease as a result of the war. 

    As a French Iraqi, I’m used to translating Iraq for a French audience, right from when I returned from my first visit in 1989 and tried explaining what life in Iraq was like to my school friends. But I also think of my role as an archivist, a keeper of memories, both joyful and hard – my own and my family’s and of the people in Fallujah and across Iraq. It’s why I became a journalist, to insist on recording the history of our present moment, however imperfect and incomplete it is. It’s the only way I can piece together the full picture of what happened to Fallujah, my lost hometown. 

    This essay was edited by Anjali Kamat and Andrew Donohue and copy edited by Nikki Frick.

    Feurat Alani can be reached at feurat@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter: @Feurat.

    Fallujah: My Lost Hometown is a story from Reveal. Reveal is a registered trademark of The Center for Investigative Reporting and is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization.

    This post was originally published on Reveal.

  • How Yemen Used the ‘War on Terror’ to Suit Its Needs

    An illustration in shades of blue shows a woman standing in a ruined building as fighter jets fly past. In the corner is a burst of yellow light that could be a sunrise or explosion.

    This is part of a series of reported essays describing how 9/11 and the “war on terror” that followed changed the lives of people outside the United States.

    On Sept. 11, 2001, I was between jobs and living in Washington, D.C. I woke up a few minutes before 9 a.m. and, as I always did, I turned on the television to watch the news. Still drowsy, I stared at the looping videos from New York on my screen, trying to make sense of what I was looking at. When the third plane struck the Pentagon half an hour later, I was jolted out of my state of shock and frantically tried to call my brother, who worked at a bank inside the Pentagon complex. He’d left his cellphone at home that day, which, of course, added to the general sense of panic I was feeling until I spoke to him that evening. And slowly, we digested the news that 15 of the 19 hijackers were from our home country, Saudi Arabia.

    In the hours after the attacks, it was apparent that war was coming, but who would be the target? President George W. Bush made it clear to leaders across the world: Either you were with the United States or with the terrorists. And with that, governments in the Middle East and North Africa saw the opportunity for billions of dollars to fund counterterrorism operations. I didn’t know it then, but I would end up spending much of the next two decades reporting on how many of them would expand and adapt the framing of the so-called “war on terror” to suit their own needs. 

    Nowhere was this more obvious and devastating to me than in Yemen, a country I fell in love with on my first visit in the late 2000s. Sanaa, the capital city, was everything I had wished Riyadh, the Saudi Arabian capital, could be. Women in Sanaa were an integrated part of society, visible, active and vocal. While women in Saudi Arabia were still banned from driving, here, women drove everywhere. I found the vibrant journalism and media scene exhilarating and was inspired by how well it represented the full spectrum of political parties and opinions in the country. Most of all, I loved the ease with which I could wander the streets of old Sanaa, buying books from Hadda Street and drinking Adeni tea while talking openly with friends about politics, religion and history. 

    Of course, Yemen was no paradise. Yemenis had endured political repression, corruption and the legendary kleptocracy of President Ali Abdullah Saleh since 1990. But the more time I spent in Yemen, the more stories I heard about how much worse the repression had gotten after 9/11, after Saleh became an important ally in America’s war on terror. 

    But Yemen had been caught up in American counterterrorism priorities even before that. Almost a full year before the 9/11 attacks, two al-Qaida members on a dingy loaded with explosives carried out a suicide bombing attack on the USS Cole, an American warship docked in Aden, in southern Yemen. They killed 17 U.S. sailors, making it unavoidable in some ways that Yemen would have to align with the United States. 

    Saleh visited the White House in November 2001 and in exchange for millions of dollars, he promised to crack down on suspected terrorists and al-Qaida activity. But over the next several years, Saleh would use the war on terror to fight his own battles, regardless of whether they had any connection to al-Qaida. This included waging six brutal wars against an insurgency by the Houthis, a militia in northern Yemen, as well as repressing al-Hirak al-Janoubi, a nonviolent movement calling for southern independence. 

    Since at least late 2009, Washington was aware of how Saleh was using American weapons and U.S.-trained counterterrorism units to fight the Houthis, according to leaked diplomatic cables. A Senate Foreign Relations Committee report in early 2010 expressed “serious concerns” that Saleh had “diverted” American counterterrorism assistance to fight the Houthis rather than al-Qaida. Indeed, while Yemen’s security forces were focused on defeating the Houthis and shutting down protests in the big cities, al-Qaida expanded its presence in more isolated parts of the country. This Yemeni offshoot came to be known as al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP.

    And yet, throughout this period, U.S. support for Saleh never waned. 

    In 2011, a massive popular uprising sprang up against Saleh, part of the so-called Arab Spring protests. After 33 years in power, he was ousted in 2012. In the chaos that followed, the country was fractured between multiple warring factions, and AQAP seized large parts of the south.

    That’s when I went to southern Yemen to film a FRONTLINE documentary about the AQAP takeover. At one of the AQAP checkpoints, I met a young man whose life choices I still think about today. He used to be an activist with al-Hirak but told me the repression he witnessed left him completely disillusioned with nonviolence as a political strategy. He said he was tired of every protest march ending in a funeral. 

    I immediately thought of the icon of the al-Hirak movement, a 25-year-old activist named Ahmed Darwish, who had been tortured to death by Yemeni security forces in 2010. His family refused to bury him until there was an impartial investigation into his death, and when thousands of people gathered for his funeral a year later, security forces opened fire on them.

    The young man who had joined AQAP told me he didn’t agree with al-Qaida’s ideology, nor did he hate the Americans. He said he joined al-Qaida only because they seemed better equipped to fight their common adversary, the Yemeni government.

    This was the landscape in which President Barack Obama increased military aid to Yemen and escalated drone strikes against alleged al-Qaida targets. Some of these were strikes against known AQAP leaders like the American cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who was killed in a drone strike in 2011. But some others targeted unidentified groups of men and boys over 16 simply because their behavior bore the “signature” of military activity. Nearly 1,800 Yemenis are estimated to have died from U.S. drone strikes and other counterterrorism operations in Yemen. Yet there’s no accounting for how many of them might be civilians. That’s because of the persistent lack of transparency around drone strikes, as well as a controversial method of counting “military-age males” as combatants.

    A woman looks out a car window as desert landscape passes by. She holds a small orange lollipop.
    After successfully stopping two young men who we believed to be fighters from the Yemeni affiliate of the Islamic State group, a woman from a village that has been repeatedly drone-bombed in Yemen takes out an orange lollipop in February 2018. Credit: Safa Al Ahmad

    In a country torn apart by multiple warring factions and where allegiances have been shifting at a dizzying pace, it’s extremely difficult to pinpoint who exactly is AQAP or the Islamic State group. By 2014, the Houthis had taken over Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, and al-Hirak had turned into a fully armed movement fighting the Houthis. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates labeled the Houthis a terrorist group backed by Iran, but the Houthis are also sworn enemies of al-Qaida and the Islamic State group. And since the Obama administration started backing a Saudi-led coalition in its war against the Houthis in 2015 – a war that has turned Yemen into the world’s worst humanitarian crisis – the battle lines have gotten even more blurred.

    To get a sense of how this all played out on the ground, I visited parts of southern Yemen that had been pounded by drone attacks in 2017 and 2018, when President Donald Trump further expanded the war on terror in Yemen. The highways were littered with the remnants of cars that had been struck by drones. But it wasn’t just the drone attacks that left people traumatized. 

    The rusted, twisted remains of a car sit in the sand.
    A car bombed in a drone strike sits along the highway between Shabwa and Marib, Yemen, in 2018. Credit: Safa Al Ahmad

    In a small village called Adhlan in Marib province, 50 Navy SEALs had landed on the hilltops around the village in May 2017. It was the largest known ground raid on Yemen. The goal was to capture al-Qaida leaders. Ultimately, the Pentagon said seven militants had been killed. But there were also five civilian casualties, among them a 15-year-old boy and a man in his 70s. When I got there in early 2018 to interview villagers for another FRONTLINE documentary, it was several months after the raid, but the families were still traumatized, struggling to understand what had happened to them. 

    Mujahid, a boy of 7 at the time, was clearly affected by the raid. He had lost his brother and his uncle, as well as his hearing in one ear. I was filming on the hilltop where the Navy SEALs had landed, and Mujahid’s father was gently teasing his son, “Look, it’s an American!” The boy looked panic-stricken, his eyes darting across the landscape, searching for the American. When his father pointed at me, Mujahid grabbed the closest stone to throw at me. His father stopped him just in time, telling him there was nothing to fear.

    Twenty years, $850 million in military aid and nearly 400 drone strikes later, when I think of the legacy of the war on terror in Yemen, I am still haunted by the look of terror that swept across Mujahid’s face. 

    This essay was edited by Anjali Kamat and Andrew Donohue and copy edited by Nikki Frick.
    Follow Safa Al Ahmad on Twitter: @ghariba33.

    How Yemen Used the ‘War on Terror’ to Suit Its Needs is a story from Reveal. Reveal is a registered trademark of The Center for Investigative Reporting and is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization.

    This post was originally published on Reveal.

  • Forever Wars

    Since 9/11, the power of the U.S. military has been felt around the world in the name of rooting out terrorism. But at what cost? From Fallujah in Iraq to tiny villages in Afghanistan and Yemen, Reveal reporter Anjali Kamat talks to three journalists about how America’s so-called war on terror has shaped an entire generation. 

    Anand Gopal is a foreign journalist who traveled across the Afghan countryside, meeting with Taliban commanders and trying to understand how people understood the war. He says when U.S. President George W. Bush divided the world into those who are “with us” and those who are “with the terrorists,” it was an oversimplification and had tragic consequences for Afghanistan. Within months of the invasion, the Taliban wanted to surrender, but 9/11 was fresh and the U.S. said no. Instead, the military allied with anti-Taliban warlords and incentivized them to hunt down “terrorists.” Gopal says thousands of innocent people were arrested, tortured and killed – which only galvanized the Taliban and drew more recruits to their ranks. 

    To many Americans, Fallujah is remembered as the site of two brutal battles where many Americans died during the invasion of Iraq. But to journalist Feurat Alani, it’s also his parents’ hometown. While American TVs filled with images of the city as a jihadist stronghold, Alani knew it was a bustling city full of regular people whose lives would be forever changed by the invasion. Alani recounts precious memories of Fallujah, like swimming in the Euphrates River with his cousins and seeing football matches with his uncles. But after the invasion, his family fell apart and the city was reduced to rubble. The football stadium turned into a cemetery, and joyful moments there became somber walks through gravestones.   

    Finally, journalist and filmmaker Safa Al Ahmad talks about what America’s post-9/11 wars have done to Yemen, where drone strikes became part of everyday life for civilians. Al Ahmad recounts what it felt like to ride in a pickup truck, wondering if she would be targeted as the sound of a drone buzzed overhead. She saw on the ground how the tactics of the war on terror in Yemen led to resentment and hostility among people whose lives were upended. While the 9/11 attacks happened 20 years ago, Al Ahmad says that for people in other places, bombings, airstrikes and drone attacks have never stopped. “They’re still living the nightmare that people in New York lived for the day,” she says.

    This post was originally published on Reveal.

  • ‘Fortress USA’: How 9/11 produced a military industrial juggernaut

    ANALYSIS: By Clare Corbould, Deakin University

    Since the September 11 terror attacks, there has been no hiding from the increased militarisation of the United States. Everyday life is suffused with policing and surveillance.

    This ranges from the inconvenient, such as removing shoes at the airport, to the dystopian, such as local police departments equipped with decommissioned tanks too big to use on regular roads.

    This process of militarisation did not begin with 9/11. The American state has always relied on force combined with the de-personalisation of its victims.

    The army, after all, dispossessed First Nations peoples of their land as settlers pushed westward. Expanding the American empire to places such as Cuba, the Philippines, and Haiti also relied on force, based on racist justifications.

    The military also ensured American supremacy in the wake of the Second World War. As historian Nikhil Pal Singh writes, about 8 million people were killed in US-led or sponsored wars from 1945–2019 — and this is a conservative estimate.

    When Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican and former military general, left the presidency in 1961, he famously warned against the growing “military-industrial complex” in the US. His warning went unheeded and the protracted conflict in Vietnam was the result.

    General Dwight D. Eisenhower in second world war.
    General Dwight D. Eisenhower addresses American paratroopers prior to D-Day in the Second World War. Image: Wikimedia Commons

    The 9/11 attacks then intensified US militarisation, both at home and abroad. George W. Bush was elected in late 2000 after campaigning to reduce US foreign interventions.

    The new president discovered, however, that by adopting the persona of a tough, pro-military leader, he could sweep away lingering doubts about the legitimacy of his election.

    Waging war on Afghanistan within a month of the Twin Towers falling, Bush’s popularity soared to 90 percent. War in Iraq, based on the dubious assertion of Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction”, soon followed.

    The military industrial juggernaut
    Investment in the military state is immense. 9/11 ushered in the federal, cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security, with an initial budget in 2001-02 of US$16 billion. Annual budgets for the agency peaked at US$74 billion in 2009-10 and is now around US$50 billion.

    This super-department vacuumed up bureaucracies previously managed by a range of other agencies, including justice, transportation, energy, agriculture, and health and human services.

    Centralising services under the banner of security has enabled gross miscarriages of justice. These include the separation of tens of thousands of children from parents at the nation’s southern border, done in the guise of protecting the country from so-called illegal immigrants.

    More than 300 of the some 1000 children taken from parents during the Trump administration have still not been reunited with family.

    Detainees in a holding cell at the US-Mexico border.
    Detainees sleep in a holding cell where mostly Central American immigrant children are being processed at the US-Mexico border. Image: The Conversation/Ross D. Franklin/AP

    The post-9/11 Patriot Act also gave spying agencies paramilitary powers. The act reduced barriers between the CIA, FBI, and the National Security Agency (NSA) to permit the acquiring and sharing of Americans’ private communications.

    These ranged from telephone records to web searches. All of this was justified in an atmosphere of near-hysterical and enduring anti-Muslim fervour.

    Only in 2013 did most Americans realise the extent of this surveillance network. Edward Snowden, a contractor working at the NSA, leaked documents that revealed a secret US$52 billion budget for 16 spying agencies and over 100,000 employees.

    Normalisation of the security state
    Despite the long objections of civil liberties groups and disquiet among many private citizens, especially after Snowden’s leaks, it has proven difficult to wind back the industrialised security state.

    This is for two reasons: the extent of the investment, and because its targets, both domestically and internationally, are usually not white and not powerful.

    Domestically, the 2015 Freedom Act renewed almost all of the Patriot Act’s provisions. Legislation in 2020 that might have stemmed some of these powers stalled in Congress.

    And recent reports suggest President Joe Biden’s election has done little to alter the detention of children at the border.

    Militarisation is now so commonplace that local police departments and sheriff’s offices have received some US$7 billion worth of military gear (including grenade launchers and armoured vehicles) since 1997, underwritten by federal government programmes.

    Atlanta police in riot gear.
    Atlanta police line up in riot gear before a protest in 2014. Image: The Conversation/Curtis Compton/AP

    Militarised police kill civilians at a high rate — and the targets for all aspects of policing and incarceration are disproportionately people of colour. And yet, while the sight of excessively armed police forces during last year’s Black Lives Matter protests shocked many Americans, it will take a phenomenal effort to reverse this trend.

    The heavy cost of the war on terror
    The juggernaut of the militarised state keeps the United States at war abroad, no matter if Republicans or Democrats are in power.

    Since 9/11, the US “war on terror” has cost more than US$8 trillion and led to the loss of up to 929,000 lives.

    The effects on countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Syria, and Pakistan have been devastating, and with the US involvement in Somalia, Libya, the Philippines, Mali, and Kenya included, these conflicts have resulted in the displacement of some 38 million people.

    These wars have become self-perpetuating, spawning new terror threats such as the Islamic State and now perhaps ISIS-K.

    Those who serve in the US forces have suffered greatly. Roughly 2.9 million living veterans served in post-9/11 conflicts abroad. Of the some 2 million deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, perhaps 36 percent are experiencing PTSD.

    Training can be utterly brutal. The military may still offer opportunities, but the lives of those who serve remain expendable.

    Fighter jet in the Persian Gulf
    Sailor cleaning a fighter jet during aboard the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf in 2010. Image: The Conversation/Hasan Jamali/AP

    Life must be precious
    Towards the end of his life, Robert McNamara, the hard-nosed Ford Motor Company president and architect of the United States’ disastrous military efforts in Vietnam, came to regret deeply his part in the military-industrial juggernaut.

    In his 1995 memoir, he judged his own conduct to be morally repugnant. He wrote,

    We of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations who participated in the decisions on Vietnam acted according to what we thought were the principles and traditions of this nation. We made our decisions in light of those values. Yet we were wrong, terribly wrong.

    In interviews with the filmmaker Errol Morris, McNamara admitted, obliquely, to losing sight of the simple fact the victims of the militarised American state were, in fact, human beings.

    As McNamara realised far too late, the solution to reversing American militarisation is straightforward. We must recognise, in the words of activist and scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore, that “life is precious”. That simple philosophy also underlies the call to acknowledge Black Lives Matter.

    The best chance to reverse the militarisation of the US state is policy guided by the radical proposal that life — regardless of race, gender, status, sexuality, nationality, location or age — is indeed precious.

    As we reflect on how the United States has changed since 9/11, it is clear the country has moved further away from this basic premise, not closer to it.The Conversation

    Dr Clare Corbould, Associate Professor, Contemporary Histories Research Group, Deakin University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • The Costs of War Post – 9/11

    Why do we not have universal healthcare or full employment… Because, the ultra-rich are at war with everyone else. 

    This post was originally published on Real Progressives.

  • How Can America Wake Up From Its Post-9/11 Nightmare?

    Looking back on it now, the 1990s were an age of innocence for America. The Cold War was over and our leaders promised us a “peace dividend.” There was no TSA to make us take off our shoes at airports (how many bombs have they found in those billions of shoes?). The government could not tap a U.S. phone or read private emails without a warrant from a judge. And the national debt was only $5 trillion – compared with over $28 trillion today.

    We have been told that the criminal attacks of September 11, 2001 “changed everything.” But what really changed everything was the U.S. government’s disastrous response to them. 

    That response was not preordained or inevitable, but the result of decisions and choices made by politicians, bureaucrats and generals who fueled and exploited our fears, unleashed wars of reprehensible vengeance and built a secretive security state, all thinly disguised behind Orwellian myths of American greatness.  

    The post How Can America Wake Up From Its Post-9/11 Nightmare? appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Twenty Years Of Phony Tears About 9/11

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    The mass media are churning out articles and news segments commemorating the 20th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, many of them featuring adoring retrospectives of their celebrity president’s actions as a US senator that day. Biden’s ceremonial PR tour to New York City, Pennsylvania and the Pentagon can be expected to receive a great deal of coverage as outrage swells over the president’s controversial new nationwide vaccine mandate.

    And it’s all just so very, very stupid. This nation which has spent twenty years weeping about its victimization with Bambi-eyed innocence reacted to 9/11 with wars which killed millions and displaced tens of millions and ushered in an unprecedented new era of military expansionism which has funneled trillions of dollars to some of the worst people in the world.

    Compared to the horrors the United States unleashed upon the world under the justification of 9/11, 9/11 itself was a family trip to Disneyland. The death and destruction visited upon Iraq alone dwarfs the 2,977 people killed on 9/11 by orders of magnitude; hell, this was true of the death and destruction the US had been inflicting on Iraq even before 9/11.

    In a saner, more emotionally intelligent world, it is those deaths that Americans would be focused on this September the 11th.

    There’s a great thread being shared around on Twitter right now by someone who found a book full of political cartoons published in the wake of 9/11, and it’s a perfect reminder of just how insane people were being driven by mass media manipulation during that time. The brazen Islamophobia, the flag-waving jingoism, the mawkish histrionics and the government bootlicking contained in those vapid comics are like an emotional time portal back to the lizard brain mentality of that point in history. I especially recommend it to those who are too young to remember how people came to support the monstrous foreign policy decisions made in the aftermath of 9/11.

    It’s also an excellent lesson into why it is always best to avoid being swept up in the emotionality of a major event that’s getting a lot of narrative push, no matter how loudly the mass media are shrieking about it and no matter how many of the people around you get swept up in it.

    There was no real reason Americans needed to respond to 9/11 with slobbering patriotism and the banging of war drums. It would have made sense for everyone to feel shocked, afraid, angry and sad, but that’s all that would have happened had their minds not been manipulated by the mass media and the Bush administration into believing that the sane response to a terrorist attack is to start launching full-scale regime change invasions of sovereign nations.

    Americans could just as easily have felt sad for a bit, and had that be the end of it. Imagine. Imagine what a better world we’d be living in if the public had not consented to wars and had instead just felt their feelings for however long it took to feel them, and had that be that.

    Without being told so by solemn-looking pundits and politicians, it never would have occurred to ordinary people that the sane response to an attack by Al Qaeda was to invade and occupy Afghanistan, much less Iraq. People would’ve expected to see the individuals responsible for the attacks captured and brought to justice, just as they’d seen happen with every other terrorist attack in their country, but on their own it would never have occurred to them to think of it as an “act of war” for which wars were an appropriate response.

    But wars were planned. The US had already been strategizing to oust the Taliban before 9/11. Donald Rumsfeld was pushing for the Iraq invasion within hours of the planes striking. Further wars were planned within days. The official 9/11 narrative itself was riddled with gaping plot holes. And mass media pundits were fired if they didn’t support the Iraq invasion.

    So people were psychologically conditioned by mass-scale propaganda to believe that 9/11 was some unforgivable atrocity so egregious that it could only be paid for by rivers of blood. And that conditioning remains today, as we will see from brainwashed empire pundits weeping their crocodile tears on the 20th anniversary of an event which, compared to the consequences of their government’s retaliation, wasn’t actually a very big deal.

    It would have been infinitely better for everyone if America had done nothing, absolutely nothing, in response to 9/11, or better yet if it had left the Middle East altogether to make sure there are no extremist groups wanting them dead due to their actions there. But, again, wars were planned. And the public was psychologically brutalized into accepting them.

    This is what we should all remember on 9/11. Not those 2,977 deaths on US soil. As sad as they were, they’ve been grieved more than enough by the general public. Now it’s time to begin addressing the giant stain upon our collective soul that is the vastly greater evils those deaths were exploited to justify.

    _________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on , , Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi,  or . If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at  or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded,  to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, . 

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • The ‘war on terror’ couldn’t have happened without mainstream media

    As we approach the 20th anniversary of 9/11, The Canary has partnered with advocacy organisation CAGE. The organisation’s International Witness Campaign is commemorating 20 years of the war on terror.

    Along with over 50 other partners, we’ll be rolling out coverage and events over the next 5 months. They’ll look to critique and analyse the role of media outlets in enabling the war on terror to continue. Whilst recent months have seen the US withdrawal from Afghanistan (and the almost immediate takeover of the Taliban), this by no means signals the end of the war on terror.

    Infamous

    War criminal George Bush famously declared a “war on terror” when a number of mostly Saudi nationals bombed the twin towers in 2001. This declaration of war on a concept has characterised the domestic and foreign policies of Western governments over the past two decades.

    There’s plenty to focus on in this area – weapons of mass destruction that never existed; CIA torture and rendition; the continued operation of Guantánamo Bay; illegal wars. It’s unmistakeable that the war on terror has not been fought on battlefields alone. It’s also been played out in workplaces, schools, hospitals, and prisons. In other words, it’s been a war that’s about domination and control of Muslims in every possible arena.

    As we look back over the past 20 years, one element that’s been instrumental in the course of the war on terror has been mainstream media. Public opinion has swayed over the years, and appetite for war has been sporadic. Many protestors came together to stop the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. So much work has, and is, done to protest and resist Islamophobia. But much of this work has had to focus on repeated racism from the media.

    Manufacturing consent

    A functioning news media industry should question power, not work in service of power. Unfortunately, that generally isn’t the case in British media, and it certainly isn’t the case when it comes to coverage of Muslims. Outlets across the political spectrum are guilty of fanning the flames of Islamophobia and racism. It’s no accident that the phrase “manufacturing consent” often pops up in these discussions. Domestic and foreign policy decisions don’t happen in isolation. They happen within the context of a range of media outlets that prop them up.

    A 2018 report from the Centre for Media Monitoring found:

    Almost 1 in 4 online articles (23%) misrepresent an aspect of Muslim behaviour or belief

    The Muslim Council of Britain has a running tally of misrepresentation and outright hostility towards Muslims. The need for such reports and initiatives has come from domination of the media landscape by the same, few wealthy voices. Their wealth has brought them their connections. This, in turn, equips them to dominate propaganda about Muslims.

    In 2019, the outgoing chairperson of the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO) Alan Moses said:

    The portrayal of Islam and Muslims in the British press has been the most difficult issue facing the press watchdog in the past five years.

    Warmongers

    I don’t quote these reports and statistics to give legitimacy to the problem I’m describing. The fact that even white-dominated organisations like IPSO are noticing these trends tells us the scale of the issue. Muslims have intimate knowledge of how the media has used fear to whip up a public frenzy against them. And governments have instrumentalised this frenzy to push through their actions in the war on terror.

    At this stage it’s almost pointless to offer up headlines and front pages to describe the media’s complicity. It’s become so ingrained in British culture that it’s now part of the fabric of this country. Governments may well have declared the war on terror, but it’s been the media that has kept the war drum beating.

    Fear and ignorance

    In his 1981 book Covering Islam, scholar Edward Said writes:

    Far from challenging the vulgar stereotypes circulated in the media, the academic experts on Islam are… status symbols of relevant authority on Islam, and also dependent on the whole system constituting and legitimating their function within it: and it is this system which the media, in their reliance upon stereotypes based on fear and ignorance, reflect.

    Whilst Said was discussing academics, the pattern of thinking he describes is also relevant for journalists. Mainstream media is full of white people who have no experience, relevance, or expertise to speak on Islamophobia or racism. And yet, they have the loudest voices and largest platforms. They peddle ill-disguised support for government policies which seek to make all Muslims the target of increased securitisation and suspicion.

    Some journalists have neutralised their own capacity for critique in order to serve as cogs in the machinery of war that they uphold. They rely on stereotypes that keep the wheels of fear and ignorance turning. It’s not in their interests to question power, no matter how many Muslims are scapegoated, tortured, surveilled, or abused.

    Power

    Even in the 80s, well before 9/11, Said warned about the dangers of media outlets misrepresenting and obscuring power:

    Underlying every interpretation of other cultures–especially of Islam–is the choice facing the individual scholar or intellectual: whether to put intellect at the service of power or at the service of criticism, community, and moral sense.

    What Said is describing here is the choice that commentators face when they report on the ‘war on terror.’ Are you going to work in the service of power? Or are you going to work in the spirit of critical thinking, community ties, and with a sense of morality?

    What we’ve seen over the past 20 years from mainstream media outlets is a consistent commitment to racism, white supremacy, and Islamophobia. Indeed, it’s a choice which allies itself to the racism, white supremacy, and Islamophobia of any British government over the past 20 years.

    Featured image via The Canary

    By Maryam Jameela

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Barbara Lee, Who Voted Against 9/11 “Forever Wars,” Calls for Afghan War Inquiry

    Twenty years ago, Rep. Barbara Lee was the only member of Congress to vote against war in the immediate aftermath of the devastating 9/11 attacks that killed about 3,000 people. “Let us not become the evil that we deplore,” she urged her colleagues in a dramatic address on the House floor. The final vote in the House was 420-1. This week, as the U.S. marks the 20th anniversary of 9/11, Rep. Lee spoke with Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman about her fateful vote in 2001 and how her worst fears about “forever wars” came true. “All it said was the president can use force forever, as long as that nation, individual or organization was connected to 9/11. I mean, it was just a total abdication of our responsibilities as members of Congress,” Rep. Lee says.

    TRANSCRIPT

    This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

    AMY GOODMAN: Saturday marks the 20th anniversary of the September 11th attacks. In the days that followed, the nation reeled from the deaths of over 3,000 people, as President George W. Bush beat the drums for war. On September 14, 2001, three days after the devastating 9/11 attacks, members of Congress held a five-hour debate on whether to grant the president expansive powers to use military force in retaliation for the attacks, which the Senate had already passed by a vote of 98 to 0.

    California Democratic Congressmember Barbara Lee, her voice trembling with emotion as she spoke from the House floor, would be the sole member of Congress to vote against the war in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. The final vote was 420 to 1.

    REP. BARBARA LEE: Mr. Speaker, members, I rise today really with a very heavy heart, one that is filled with sorrow for the families and the loved ones who were killed and injured this week. Only the most foolish and the most callous would not understand the grief that has really gripped our people and millions across the world.

    This unspeakable act on the United States has really forced me, however, to rely on my moral compass, my conscience and my god for direction. September 11th changed the world. Our deepest fears now haunt us. Yet I am convinced that military action will not prevent further acts of international terrorism against the United States. This is a very complex and complicated matter.

    Now, this resolution will pass, although we all know that the president can wage a war even without it. However difficult this vote may be, some of us must urge the use of restraint. Our country is in a state of mourning. Some of us must say, “Let’s step back for a moment. Let’s just pause, just for a minute, and think through the implications of our actions today so that this does not spiral out of control.”

    Now, I have agonized over this vote, but I came to grips with it today, and I came to grips with opposing this resolution during the very painful yet very beautiful memorial service. As a member of the clergy so eloquently said, “As we act, let us not become the evil that we deplore.” Thank you, and I yield the balance of my time.

    AMY GOODMAN: “Let us not become the evil we deplore.” And with those words, Oakland Congressmember Barbara Lee rocked the House, the Capitol, this country, the world, the lone voice of more than 400 congressmembers.

    At the time, Barbara Lee was one of the newest members of Congress and one of the few African American women to hold office in either the House or the Senate. Now in her 12th term, she is the highest-ranking African American woman in Congress.

    Yes, it’s 20 years later. And on Wednesday this week, I interviewed Congressmember Lee during a virtual event hosted by the Institute for Policy Studies, which was founded by Marcus Raskin, a former aide in the Kennedy administration who became a progressive activist and author. I asked Congressmember Lee how she decided to stand alone, what went into that decision, where she was when she decided she was going to give her speech, and then how people responded to it.

    REP. BARBARA LEE: Thanks so much, Amy. And really, thanks to everyone, especially IPS for hosting this very important forum today. And let me just say to those from IPS, for historical context and also just in honor of Marcus Raskin, Marcus was the last person I talked to before I gave that speech — the very last person.

    I had gone to the memorial and had come back. And I was on the committee of jurisdiction, which was the Foreign Affairs Committee with this, where the authorization was coming from. And, of course, it didn’t go through the committee. It was supposed to come up on Saturday. I got back to the office, and my staff said, “You’ve got to get to the floor. The authorization is coming up. The vote is coming up within another hour or two.”

    So I had to race down to the floor. And I was trying to get my thoughts together. As you can see, I was kind of not — I won’t say “not prepared,” but I didn’t have what I wanted in terms of my sort of framework and talking points. I had to just scribble something on a piece of paper. And I called Marcus. And I said, “OK.” I said — and I had talked to him for the last three days. And I talked to my former boss, Ron Dellums, who was, for those of you who don’t know, a great warrior for peace and justice from my district. I worked for him 11 years, my predecessor. So I talked with Ron, and he’s a psychiatric social worker by profession. And I talked to several constitutional lawyers. I’ve talked to my pastor, of course, my mother and family.

    And it was a very difficult time, but no one that I talked to, Amy, suggested how I should vote. And it was very interesting. Even Marcus didn’t. We talked about the pros and cons, what the Constitution required, what this was about, all the considerations. And it was very helpful for me to be able to talk to these individuals, because it seems like they didn’t want to tell me to vote no, because they knew all hell was going to break loose. But they really gave me kind of, you know, the pros and cons.

    Ron, for example, we kind of walked through our background in psychology and psychiatric social work. And we said, you know, the first thing you learn in Psychology 101 is that you don’t make critical, serious decisions when you’re grieving and when you’re mourning and when you’re anxious and when you’re angry. Those are moments where you have to live — you know, you have to get through that. You have to push through that. Then maybe you can begin to engage in a process that’s thoughtful. And so, Ron and I talked a lot about that.

    I talked with other members of the clergy. And I don’t think I talked to him, but I mentioned him at that — because I was following a lot of his work and sermons, and he’s a friend of mine, Reverend James Forbes, who is the pastor of Riverside Church, Reverend William Sloane Coffin. And they in the past had talked about just wars, what just wars were about, what are the criteria for just wars. And so, you know, my faith was weighing in, but it was basically the constitutional requirement that members of Congress can’t give away our responsibility to any executive branch, to the president, whether it’s a Democrat or a Republican president.

    And so I came to the decision that — once I read the resolution, because we had one before, kicked it back, no one could support that. And when they brought back the second one, it was still too overly broad, 60 words, and all it said was the president can use force forever, as long as that nation, individual or organization was connected to 9/11. I mean, it was just a total abdication of our responsibilities as members of Congress. And I knew then that it was setting the stage for — and I’ve always called it — forever wars, in perpetuity.

    And so, when I was at the cathedral, I heard Reverend Nathan Baxter when he said, “As we act, let us not become the evil that we deplore.” I wrote that on the program, and I was pretty settled then that I — going into the memorial service, I knew that I was 95% voting no. But when I heard him, that was 100%. I knew that I had to vote no.

    And actually, prior to going to the memorial service, I was not going to go. I talked to Elijah Cummings. We were talking in the back of the chambers. And something just motivated me and moved me to say, “No, Elijah, I’m going,” and I ran down the steps. I think I was the last person on the bus. It was a gloomy, rainy day, and I had a can of ginger ale in my hand. I’ll never forget that. And so, that’s kind of, you know, what led up to this. But it was a very grave moment for the country.

    And, of course, I was sitting in the Capitol and had to evacuate that morning with a few members of the Black Caucus and the administrator of the Small Business Administration. And we had to evacuate at 8:15, 8:30. Little did I know why, except “Get out of here.” Looked back, saw the smoke, and that was the Pentagon that had been hit. But also on that plane, on Flight 93, which was coming into the Capitol, my chief of staff, Sandré Swanson, his cousin was Wanda Green, one of the flight attendants on Flight 93. And so, during this week, of course, I’ve been thinking about everyone who lost their lives, the communities that still haven’t recovered. And those heroes and sheroes on Flight 93, who took that plane down, could have saved my life and saved the lives of those in the Capitol.

    So, it was, you know, a very sad moment. We were all grieving. We were angry. We were anxious. And everyone, of course, wanted to bring terrorists to justice, including myself. I’m not a pacifist. So, no, I’m the daughter of a military officer. But I do know — my dad was in World War II and Korea, and I know what getting on a war footing means. And so, I am not one to say let’s use the military option as the first option, because I know we can deal with issues around war and peace and terrorism in alternative ways.

    AMY GOODMAN: So, what happened after you came off the floor of the House, giving that momentous two-minute speech and going back to your office? What was the reaction?

    REP. BARBARA LEE: Well, I went back into the cloakroom, and everyone ran back to get me. And I remember. Most members — only 25% of members in 2001 are currently serving now, mind you, but there’s still many serving. And they came back to me and, out of friendship, said, “You have got to change your vote.” It wasn’t anything like, “What’s wrong with you?” or “Don’t you know you have to be united?” because this was the pitch: “You have to be united with the president. We can’t politicize this. It’s got to be Republicans and Democrats.” But they didn’t come at me like that. They said, “Barbara” — one member said, “You know, you’re doing such great work on HIV and AIDS.” This was when I was in the middle of working with Bush on the global PEPFAR and the Global Fund. “You’re not going to win your reelection. We need you here.” Another member said, “Don’t you know harm is going to come your way, Barbara? We don’t want you hurt. You know, you need to go back and change that vote.”

    Several members came back to say, “Are you sure? You know, you voted no. Are you sure?” And then one of my good friends — and she said this publicly — Congresswoman Lynn Woolsey, she and I talked, and she said, “You’ve got to change your vote, Barbara.” She says, “Even my son” — she told me her family said, “This is a hard time for the country. And even myself, you know, we’ve got to be unified, and we’re going to vote. You need to change your vote.” And it was only out of concern for me that members came to ask me to change my vote.

    Now later, my mother said — my late mother said, “They should have called me,” she said, “because I would have told them that after you deliberated in your head and talked to people, if you’ve come to a decision, that you’re pretty bullheaded and pretty stubborn. It’s going to take a lot to get you to change your mind. But you don’t make these decisions easily.” She said, “You’re always open.” My mother told me that. She said, “They should have called me. I would have told them.”

    So, then I walked back to the office. And my phone started ringing. Of course, I looked up at the television, and there was the, you know, little ticker saying, “One no vote.” And I think one reporter was saying, “I wonder who that was.” And then my name showed up.

    And so, well, so I started walking back to my office. Phone started blowing up. The first call was from my dad, Lieutenant — in fact, in his latter years, he wanted me to call him Colonel Tutt. He was so proud of being in the military. Again, World War II, he was in the 92nd Battalion, which was the only African American battalion in Italy, supporting the Normandy invasion, OK? And then he later went to Korea. And he was the first person who called me. And he said, “Do not change your vote. That was the right vote” — because I had not talked to him beforehand. I wasn’t sure. I said, “Nah, I ain’t gonna call dad yet. I’m going to talk to my mother.” He says, “You do not send our troops in harm’s way.” He said, “I know what wars are like. I know what it does to families.” He said, “You don’t have — you don’t know where they’re going. What are you doing? How’s the Congress going to just put them out there without any strategy, without a plan, without Congress knowing at least what the heck is going on?” So, he said, “That’s the right vote. You stick with it.” And he was really — and so I felt really happy about that. I felt really proud.

    But the death threats came. You know, I can’t even tell you the details of how horrible it is. People did some awful things during that time to me. But, as Maya Angelou said, “And still I rise,” and we just keep going. And the letters and the emails and the phone calls that were very hostile and hateful and calling me a traitor and said I committed an act of treason, they’re all at Mills College, my alma mater.

    But also, there were — actually, 40% of those communications — there’s 60,000 — 40% are very positive. Bishop Tutu, Coretta Scott King, I mean, people from all around the world sent some very positive messages to me.

    And since then — and I’ll close by just sharing this one story, because this is after the fact, just a couple years ago. As many of you know, I supported Kamala Harris for president, so I was in South Carolina, as a surrogate, at a big rally, security everywhere. And this tall, big white guy with a little kid comes through the crowd — right? — with tears in his eyes. What in the world is this? He came up to me, and he said to me — he said, “I was one of those who sent you a threatening letter. I was one of those.” And he went down all what he said to me. I said, “I hope the cops don’t hear you saying that.” But he was one who threatened me. He said, “And I came here to apologize. And I brought my son here, because I wanted him to see me tell you how sorry I am and how right you were, and just know that this is a day for me that I’ve been waiting for.”

    And so, I’ve had — over the years, many, many people have come, in different ways, to say that. And so, that’s what kept me going, in a lot of ways, knowing that — you know, because of Win Without War, because of the Friends Committee, because of IPS, because of our Veterans for Peace and all the groups that have been working around the country, organizing, mobilizing, educating the public, people really have begun to understand what this was about and what it means. And so, I just have to thank everybody for circling the wagons, because it was not easy, but because all of you were out there, people come up to me now and say nice things and support me with a lot of — really, a lot of love.

    AMY GOODMAN: Well, Congressmember Lee, now it is 20 years later, and President Biden has pulled the U.S. troops out of Afghanistan. He’s being fiercely attacked by both Democrats and Republicans for the chaos of the last few weeks. And there’s been — Congress is calling an inquiry into what happened. But do you think that inquiry should extend to the whole 20 years of the longest war in U.S. history?

    REP. BARBARA LEE: I think we need an inquiry. I don’t know if it’s the same one. But, first of all, let me say I was one of the few members who got out there early, supporting the president: “You’ve made the absolute correct decision.” And, in fact, I know that if we stayed there militarily for another five, 10, 15, 20 years, we’d be probably in a worse place, because there’s no military solution in Afghanistan, and we can’t nation build. That’s a given.

    And so, while it was difficult for him, we talked a lot about this during the campaign. And I was on the drafting committee of the platform, and you can go back and kind of look at what both Bernie and the Biden advisers on the platform came up with. So, it was promises made, promises kept. And he knew that this was a hard decision. He did the right thing.

    But having said that, yes, the evacuation was really rocky in the beginning, and there was no plan. I mean, I don’t guess; it didn’t appear to me to be a plan. We did not know — even, I don’t think, the Intelligence Committee. At least, it was faulty or not — or inconclusive intelligence, I assume, about the Taliban. And so, there were a lot of holes and gaps that we’re going to have to learn about.

    We have an oversight responsibility to find out, first of all, what happened as it relates to the evacuation, even though it was remarkable that so many — what? — over 120,000 people were evacuated. I mean, come on, in a few weeks? I think that that is an unbelievable evacuation that took place. Still people are left there, women and girls. We’ve got to secure, make sure they’re secure, and make sure there’s a way to help with their education and get every American out, every Afghan ally out. So there’s still more work to do, which is going to require a lot of diplomatic — many diplomatic initiatives to really accomplish that.

    But finally, let me just say, you know, the special inspector for Afghanistan reconstruction, he’s come out with reports over and over and over again. And the last one, I just want to read a little bit about what the last one — just came out a couple weeks ago. He said, “We were not equipped to be in Afghanistan.” He said, “This was a report that will outline the lessons learned and aim to pose questions to policymakers rather than making new recommendations.” The report also found that the United States government — and this is in the report — “did not understand the Afghan context, including socially, culturally and politically.” Additionally — and this is the SIGAR, the special inspector general — he said that the “U.S. officials rarely even had a mediocre understanding of the Afghan environment,” — I’m reading this from the report — and “much less how it was responding to U.S. interventions,” and that this ignorance often came from a “willful disregard for information that may have been available.”

    And he’s been — these reports have been coming out for the last 20 years. And we’ve been having hearings and forums and trying to make them public, because they are public. And so, yes, we need to go back and do a deep dive and a drill-down. But we also need to do our oversight responsibilities in terms of what just recently happened, so that it’ll never happen again, but also so that the last 20 years, when we conduct our oversight of what happened, will never happen again, either.

    AMY GOODMAN: And finally, in this part of the evening, especially for young people, what gave you the courage to stand alone against war?

    REP. BARBARA LEE: Oh gosh. Well, I’m a person of faith. First of all, I prayed. Secondly, I’m a Black woman in America. And I’ve been through a heck of a lot in this country, like all Black women.

    My mother — and I have to share this story, because it started at birth. I was born and raised in El Paso, Texas. And my mother went to — she needed a C-section and went to the hospital. They wouldn’t admit her because she was Black. And it took a heck of a lot for her finally to be admitted into the hospital. A lot. And by the time she got in, it was too late for a C-section. And they just left her there. And someone saw her. She was unconscious. And then they, you know, just saw her laying on the hall. They just put her on, she said, a gurney and left her there. And so, finally, they didn’t know what to do. And so they took her into — and she told me it was an emergency room, wasn’t even the delivery room. And they ended up trying to figure out how in the world they were going to save her life, because by then she was unconscious. And so they had to pull me out of my mother’s womb using forceps, you hear me? Using forceps. So I almost didn’t get here. I almost couldn’t breathe. I almost died in childbirth. My mother almost died having me. So, you know, as a child, I mean, what can I say? If I had the courage to get here, and my mother had the courage to birth me, I guess everything else is like no problem.

    AMY GOODMAN: Well, Congressmember Lee, it’s been a pleasure talking to you, a member of the House Democratic leadership, the highest-ranking —

    AMY GOODMAN: California Congressmember Barbara Lee, yes, now in her 12th term. She is the highest-ranking African American woman in Congress. In 2001, September 14th, just three days after the 9/11 attacks, she was the sole member of Congress to vote against military authorization — the final vote, 420 to 1.

    When I interviewed her Wednesday evening, she was in California campaigning in support of Governor Gavin Newsom ahead of this Tuesday’s recall election, along with Vice President Kamala Harris, who was born in Oakland. Barbara Lee represents Oakland. On Monday, Newsom will campaign with President Joe Biden. This is Democracy Now! Stay with us.

    [break]

    AMY GOODMAN: “Remember Rockefeller at Attica” by Charles Mingus. The Attica prison uprising began 50 years ago. Then, on September 13th, 1971, then-New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller ordered armed state troopers to raid the prison. They killed 39 people, including prisoners and guards. On Monday, we’ll look at the Attica uprising on the 50th anniversary.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • COVID-19 and 9/11 (Never Forget?)

    Collage by Mickey Z

    In response to the events of September 11, 2001, the emergency use authorization (EUA) concept was created. The ostensible idea was to empower the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to allow the use of potentially life-saving products (e.g. medicines, etc.) after a terrorist attack. However, the EUA designation was not put into effect until late 2020 — for the COVID-19 “vaccines.”

    The squashing of civil liberties in The Land of the Free™ is hardly a novel idea. For just a few (of endless) examples, one may recall Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (1996), Espionage and Sedition Act (1917), National Defense Authorization Act (2011), or the FBI Counterintelligence Program, COINTELPRO (technically 1956-1971, but probably still going). Also, the interned Japanese-Americans in the 1940s just might have something to say about FDR’s concept of “freedom.” Doling out and taking away rights is essentially a side quest for America’s power elite.

    A common theme of these power grabs involves exploiting a crisis. Two decades ago, the Bush-Cheney Administration used the guise of “emergency” to reshape the country’s psyche. Steps that seemed like temporary precautions are now deemed permanent and normal. These include a wide range of changes like the Transportation Security Administration, three-ounce bottles of liquid, full-body scanners, a “No Fly” list, and the completely laughable concept of taking off your shoes before going through security (soon to be rendered fully obsolete thanks to foot scanners).

    All of the above (and so much more) would’ve once seemed like details from a bad, futuristic novel. Today, they exist without comment. The powers-that-be have effectively conditioned us to accept whatever is imposed upon us. And, post-9/11, that included the “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act,” a.k.a. the USA PATRIOT Act.

    This totalitarian salvo includes what the ACLU called “a host of alarming and unconstitutional anti-speech provisions” and was been condemned by three state legislatures and almost 250 municipalities across the United States.

    Adele Welty declared the PATRIOT Act to be “a serious threat to the exercise of our Constitutional rights.” Welty’s son Timothy lost his life in the WTC collapse — one of the 343 firefighters who died that day. She later testified before the New York City Council and said, in part: “[The USA PATRIOT Act] undermines our Fourth Amendment right to privacy and expands the ability of the government to use wiretaps and computer surveillance and to look at confidential medical, financial, business and educational records.”

    Such talk of rights and overreach sounds quaint to today’s ears. Like the internet or cellphones, the USA PATRIOT Act is just something that’s passed down to new generations without examination, thought, or even conscious awareness. That’s part of what made it so easy for the elites to use the COVID-19 pandemic to garner even more control and wealth.

    Twenty years later, we’ve come full circle to see the emergency use authorization of an experimental gene therapy being forced upon a compliant population. If you scare enough people for a long enough time, they’ll believe anything. They’ll even trust their abusers to help them. It’s trauma bonding on a macro scale.

    That’s how they got us to line up in our socks for a flight. One alleged shoe bomber event happens, a frenzy is created, and Americans happily surrender rights for the illusion of safety. Today’s thugs in charge use a faulty PCR test to inflate Covid numbers, impose useless and psychologically damaging mitigation tactics like masks and distancing, and then tell us how lucky we are that they’re here to save us with a magic shot. But, if the shot doesn’t work or causes injury, you can’t sue them.

    Here in New York City, we’re living under a vaccine mandate — almost 20 years to the day of 9/11. Unvaccinated adults can’t attend movies, work out at gyms, visit museums, or dine in restaurants. It’s to protect everyone, of course. Except that unjabbed children under 12 can go anywhere they want. Why? Because science, of course. To question this decree is to expose yourself as a potential domestic terrorist. But the authorities won’t have to find you. Your friends and neighbors will gladly turn you in — to protect everyone, of course. Remember: We’re all in this together! (Even the ACLU is now in favor of mandates.)

    Meanwhile, the majority of black and Latino adults in the Big Apple have wisely avoided the shots. Thus, this mandate is limiting the ability of People of Color to live their lives and make a living. Sounds like “structural racism” to me. Not a peep has been heard from Black Lives Matter or any other #woke organization. Some call it coincidence.

    There’s a direct line from the anti-anarchist Palmer raids to the smashing of labor unions to the Red Scare to FISA to today’s demonization of anyone who questions the patently insane Covid narrative. There’s also a direct line running through all those, um, helpful citizens who gleefully support the repressive tactics imposed by a cabal of Corporate and State actors.

    Unless and until everyday people break free of the programming, there will be more experimental drugs, more invasive technologies, more surveillance, more artificial intelligence, and more transhumanism. You’ll never stop lining up to be scanned, injected, genetically modified, and “enhanced.” There is only one hope and one path away from this dystopian future vision: rediscover the subversive of thinking for yourself.

    The post COVID-19 and 9/11 (Never Forget?) first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Paul Wolfowitz: Deluded and At Liberty

    It was all marvellous for Paul Wolfowitz to get on Australian television (why bother?) to brusquely discuss those attacks on US soil in September 2001 and criticism of the invasion of Iraq by US-led forces.  After two decades, the former US deputy secretary of defense has not mellowed.

    With each show, interview and podium performance Wolfowitz gives, there is a sense that the hole he has dug for himself has become an oasis of reassuring delusion.  Iraq’s despot Saddam Hussein, executed at the behest of authorities sponsored and propped by the US, gave Wolfowitz an ecstatic excuse to explain the rationale of American power: he was a threat, and worldly threat at that.  In 2003, there was little evidence to suggest that, but neoconservatism has always been a doctrine in search of cartoonish myths.

    The fact that Weapons of Mass Destruction featured prominently as the reason for overthrowing Saddam became the necessitous outcome of bureaucratic sensibility: “for reasons that have a lot to do with the US government bureaucracy,” he told Vanity Fair in 2003, “we settled on the one issue everyone could agree on: weapons of mass destruction”.

    When those elusive WMDs proved stubbornly elusive, PW shifted his emphasis from security rationales to one of liberation.  Along the way he blamed the “consensus judgment of the intelligence community” for not getting it right in the first place, an assessment verging on the mendacious.

    While Saddam Hussein was a high grade butcher and villain to many of his people, it is hard to credit him with the Bond villain, pulp view Wolfowitz gives him.  Evidence chasers such as Ben Bonk at the Central Intelligence Agency were frustrated in being thrown at the fruitless effort to link Saddam to al-Qaeda.  Intelligence operatives were effectively being leaned upon to confect the record and find justifications.

    In 2013, Wolfowitz was still insisting on uncertainty as a principle.  “We still don’t know how all of this is going to end.”  He accepted that the decapitation of the Iraqi leadership without an immediate substitute might have been unwise.  The “idea that we’re going to come in like [General Douglas] MacArthur in Japan and write the constitution for them” was erroneous.

    That did not matter.  The threat was there and present, growing like a stimulated bacillus.  Depraved and disoriented, he takes the argument that invading Iraq at the time was appropriate because it would have had to happen in any case. Saddam was street store vendor, sponsor and patron of terrorism (he never defines the dimension of this, nor adduces evidence) and needed to be dealt with.  The sword would eventually have to be unsheathed.  “We would very likely either have had to go through this whole scenario all over but probably with higher costs for having delayed, or we’d be in a situation today where not only Iran was edging towards nuclear weapons but so was Iraq and also Libya.”

    In 2003, the aptly named Jeffrey Record reflected his surname’s worth by taking a hatchet to the Wolfowitz view in a scathing assessment for the Strategic Studies Institute.  In declaring a global war on terrorism (GWOT), the Bush administration had identified a range of states, weapons of danger, terrorists and terrorism while conflating “them into a monolithic threat, and in so doing has subordinated strategic clarity to the moral clarity it strives for in foreign policy and may have set the United States on a course of open-ended gratuitous conflict with states and nonstate entities that pose no serious threat to the United States.”  Not sloppy, is Record.

    He goes on to note, relevantly, the conflation premise: that al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein were seen, amateurishly, “as a single, undifferentiated terrorist threat.”  This “strategic error of the first order” ignored “critical differences between the two in character, threat level, and susceptibility to US deterrence and military action” led to “an unnecessary preventive war of choice against a deterred Iraq.  The result: “a new front in the Middle East for Islamic terrorism” and the diversion of “attention and resources away from securing the American homeland against further assault by an undeterrable al-Qaeda.”

    The 9/11 Commission Report, despite noting “friendly contacts” between Osama bin Laden and Iraqi officials at various points, similarly found “no evidence that these or the earlier contacts ever developed into a collaborative personal relationship.”  Nor was there “evidence indicating that Iraq cooperated with al Qaeda in developing or carrying out any attacks against the United States.”

    Critics suggest incompetence and bungling in the invasion of Iraq.  They exclude venality and calculation.  Wolfowitz, as if anticipating a prosecution in some faraway court, has been busy covering his tracks and pointing the finger at other decision makers further up the greased pole.  The top suspect: current retiree amateur painter President George W. Bush.  “I don’t think I ever met the president alone.  I didn’t meet him very often.  [Secretary of State Colin] Powell had access to him whenever he wanted it.  And if he was so sure it was a mistake why didn’t he say so?”  What a merry band they make.

    Wolfowitz, for the defence, always has to play some useful (or useless) idiot card, proffered from the surrounds of the tired lecture circuit or the American Enterprise Institute.  He is ideologically inclined, evidentially challenged, and keen to accept material that confirms his prejudice rather than contradicts it.  When found wanting about his decisions on accepting, for instance, the bargain basement material of Ahmed Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress, he returned to common cultural themes.  “I don’t think anybody in that part of the world was completely straight with us.”

    Perhaps, after two decades, it is time to sort the books, order the records and call forth those architects of war who, dismally deluded and acting with criminal intent and incompetence, plunged a good part of the globe into conflict, leaving a legacy that continues to pollute with tenacious determination.  Along the way, we can mourn the dead of 9/11 and all the dead that followed.

    The post Paul Wolfowitz: Deluded and At Liberty first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Legacy of the US Response to 9/11 Is Terror, Domestic Surveillance and Drones

    As this week marks the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., we look at a new five-part documentary series on Netflix about the attacks and the response from the United States, both at home and abroad. Turning Point: 9/11 and the War on Terror features a wide range of interviews with survivors of the attacks, U.S. officials, former CIA members and veterans, as well as soldiers in the Afghanistan National Army, Taliban commanders, and Afghan officials, warlords and civilians. “What we really wanted to do was tell the story not just of what happened that day, but how we got there and where our response to those attacks took us as a country,” says director Brian Knappenberger. We also speak with co-executive producer Mohammed Ali Naqvi, an award-winning Pakistani filmmaker, who says the film was an attempt to go “beyond the binary narrative of good versus evil.”

    TRANSCRIPT

    This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

    AMY GOODMAN: This week marks the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center here in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. We begin today’s show with a comprehensive five-part documentary series on Netflix that examines the attacks, as well as the response from the United States both at home and abroad. The film was released just after the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan, and it features a wide range of interviews with survivors of the attacks, U.S. officials, former CIA members and veterans, as well as soldiers in the Afghanistan National Army, Taliban commanders, Afghan officials, warlords and civilians. This is the trailer for Turning Point: 9/11 and the War on Terror.

    MARILYN WILLS: It was a beautiful fall morning. There was the loudest noise I had ever heard.

    JUDY WOODRUFF: Pieces of the story continue to come together. I have never seen anything like this.

    ANDREW CARD: I whispered into the president’s ear, “America is under attack.”

    REP. BARBARA LEE: I am convinced military action will not prevent acts of terrorism.

    SOLDIER 1: Let me know where they’re shooting from!

    SOLDIER 2: Keep moving! Keep moving!

    THOMAS DRAKE: There’s before 9/11, and there’s after 9/11.

    BRUCE HOFFMAN: In the 1990s, we were fixated on a new world order that would spread democracy throughout the world.

    GARRETT GRAFF: 9/11 brought war home. It made America afraid.

    THOMAS DRAKE: The NSA said take as much data as we can.

    JAMES RISEN: This was the electronic version of an unauthorized government raid on your house.

    ALBERTO GONZALES: The United States had to punish those responsible for these attacks.

    DEXTER FILKINS: There was no higher mission than finding Osama bin Laden.

    REP. ERIC CANTOR: The perpetrators of terrorism only understand the use of force.

    CRAIG WHITLOCK: They knew all along these major problems that were going to prevent us from winning.

    SOLDIER 3: No one even, like, really mentions 9/11 anymore. And to me, that’s the whole reason that I’m over here.

    UNIDENTIFIED: Any power without constraint always leads to abuse.

    REP. BARBARA LEE: September 11th changed the world. Let’s think through our actions today so that this does not spiral out of control.

    AMY GOODMAN: The trailer for Turning Point: 9/11 and the War on Terror, a new Netflix five-part docuseries. We’re joined now by its director, Brian Knappenberger, the award-winning filmmaker, and co-executive producer Mohammed Ali Naqvi, the award-winning Pakistani filmmaker.

    We welcome you both to Democracy Now! and welcome you back, Brian. Brian, let’s begin with you. This is deep. It is comprehensive. It starts with the attacks on 9/11 but then goes back in time and, of course, moves forward over these 20 years. You were among the last to interview members of the Afghan army, as well as the people who now comprise the inner circles of the Taliban leadership. Can you talk about the scope of this series and what you’re trying to do with it?

    BRIAN KNAPPENBERGER: Yes, and thank you for having us on.

    You know, I just thought that the 20th anniversary of 9/11 — I mean, what we really wanted to do was tell the story not just of what happened that day, but how we got there and where our response to those attacks took us as a country. You know, 9/11 was one of the most transformative geopolitical events of my life. And on the first anniversary of 9/11, I happened to be in Afghanistan creating one of my first films. I’ve always wanted to look in a big way at the war on terror, and particularly the War in Afghanistan.

    And so, to do that, we go back in history. We start, essentially, with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, in which the — you know, with the CIA kind of creating a proxy war with the Soviets by supporting the mujahideen there. We look at the formation of al-Qaeda, the collapse, ultimately, of Afghanistan into a bloody civil war after the Soviets leave Afghanistan. We trace the increasing violent attacks of al-Qaeda throughout the ’90s. And we sort of frame all this also with firsthand accounts of people on the day of 9/11, what happened that day.

    But I think primarily what we’ve looked at in the series is what comes next. So we trace the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. We look at enhanced interrogation, or the torture program, as well as the effect of 9/11 on the United States — the rise of Islamophobia, mass suspicionless surveillance within the United States with programs like Stellar Wind. And so, we try to look at the full range of what 9/11 meant, both where it came from and what — the choices we made after 9/11, where that led us.

    NERMEEN SHAIKH: Mohammed Ali Naqvi, if you could say a little bit more about the focus in the film, at least in the early parts of the film, on the effect of the Soviet occupation on what transpired in subsequent years? One of the points that the film makes is that it became very common in Muslim countries and among Afghans also to believe that the mujahideen actually fought the Soviets and defeated them, and this despite the fact that 2 million Afghan civilians were killed during the Soviet occupation. So, could you say what you think the significance of that has been?

    MOHAMMED ALI NAQVI: Well, I think it’s highly significant in the sense that we got a chance to explore a narrative beyond the binary narrative of good versus evil that kind of existed post-9/11 and in the Bush-Cheney years, and we actually, as Brian was saying, got to look at how we got to this point. And one of the pivotal questions that the documentary asks us is: Why do they hate us? And I think the United States and other powers had a big hand in creating these mujahideen, in empowering them, in giving them weapons, in giving them a lot of money. So, I think no one really appreciated the effect that this was going to have later. And so, it was very important for us to definitely feature that and show that in the documentary and, you know, feature subjects like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, for example, the Afghan warlord, or Younus Malkhan [phon.] and others, and the part that they played in, well, first of all, defeating the Soviets and then, of course, the implications of what was going to be the reaction of backing different types of warlords in Afghanistan and how that contributed to, you know, al-Qaeda joining up, for example, and the rise of the Taliban.

    AMY GOODMAN: Mo, I wanted to play a few of the clips from the series because of the timeliness of this. In this clip, Turning Point: 9/11 and the War on Terror, we hear from the soldiers with the Afghan National Army.

    GEN. YASIN ZIA: [translated] The only thing that exists is that the Taliban believe they have won this war, the United States is escaping, and they should be handed the keys to the door of this country, so they can come and establish their own emirate.

    SGT. SUHAILA JAFARI: [translated] Even if the Americans withdraw their forces, we are prepared to fulfil our duties. We’ll be standing to defend our country as long as there’s blood in our bodies. We’re not going to surrender our country to the Taliban.

    SGT. AHMAD FARHAD: This is our fight. This is my country. This is my people. This is my army. Remember this face. This is not the old Afghanistan. This is the new generation. This is the new people, the new young generation and the new army.

    AMY GOODMAN: So, those are members of the Afghan army. This is another clip from Turning Point, former senior Taliban leader Jalaluddin Shinwari and former Afghan Vice President Ahmad Zia Massoud discussing what will happen after the U.S. departs Afghanistan.

    AHMAD ZIA MASSOUD: [translated] The moment the Americans leave Afghanistan and their forces are not here, international terrorism will come back. And all that investment that has been made in Afghanistan over the last 19 years will all be gone.

    JALALUDDIN SHINWARI: [translated] The Taliban logic and reason is that the government of Afghanistan is the outcome of the occupation of Afghanistan. When the Americans leave, the outcome of their occupation must be destroyed, too, and establish a new government that is acceptable for all the people of Afghanistan.

    AMY GOODMAN: So, that is Taliban leader Jalaluddin Shinwari, who was one of the negotiators in Qatar with the United States, and then, before that, the former Afghan Vice President Ahmad Zia Massoud. Mohammed Naqvi, if you can talk about the circumstances of these interviews, when you did these? Because, of course, now deeply relevant, though they happened before the Taliban took over Afghanistan.

    MOHAMMED ALI NAQVI: So, we were actually filming outside of the United States. We also filmed in Qatar and Doha, the negotiations themselves. And then, of course, we also filmed in Afghanistan and in Pakistan. And Ahmad Zia Massoud, we filmed in — I believe it was in November of 2020. And Jalaluddin Shinwari also, we filmed in November of 2020. So, this was in Kabul. And if you remember, at those times, the negotiations were still happening, and, in fact, the Taliban had gained major ground. And frankly, they were quite arrogant during their negotiations with the Afghan government, because they felt that they were in a position of power and they didn’t really have to concede much. And at that time, I think the U.S. was just trying to find a way out and just to exit. So this was around the time that we actually interviewed them.

    AMY GOODMAN: And their comment, Brian Knappenberger, for example, Jalaluddin Shinwari saying, “We will destroy everything the U.S. left in Afghanistan”?

    BRIAN KNAPPENBERGER: Yeah. Yeah, it’s so striking to hear that now. It was powerful at the time. And if you go back to that period of time that Mo was just describing, there was a lot of talk about, you know, a potential coalition kind of government, right? And our interview with him suggested something otherwise, that anything — that the outcome of their occupation, meaning the Afghan government, must also be destroyed. Those are chilling words and very striking up against the words of Massoud, who was sort of — I think, called it accurately, and then also the very moving interviews that we did with the Afghan soldiers, who it genuinely seemed were — felt like they could make a stand against the Taliban. So, that all — as you can imagine, all of that, those interviews, changed dramatically, almost by the week, right before we published the series on Netflix.

    NERMEEN SHAIKH: Mohammed, could you talk about how you made the decision to interview people? How did you select the people to interview? I mean, this film has been receiving excellent reviews. It’s one of the top 10 viewed series on Netflix at the moment in the U.S. But one of the criticisms that’s been made is that the documentary focuses far too much on U.S. voices and only politicians in Afghanistan, not so much victims or survivors of the war in Afghanistan.

    MOHAMMED ALI NAQVI: Well, for me, it was — this was quite a significant project to work on. I think when I met Brian and Eve — Eve, who is also — Eve Marson, who’s also an executive producer on the series — I immediately jumped at the chance, because a lot of my body of work was informed by 9/11. It was a very seminal event in my life. Being a Muslim American and being in New York at that time, it really informed the trajectory of the body of work that I was doing. And a lot of the work that I did do was specifically related to 9/11.

    In this, I really wanted to look beyond just, you know, American voices, and I think Brian and the rest of the team were very amenable to my suggestions of actually featuring some Afghan voices, like Afghan warlords, like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, and some of the politicians. But beyond that, we also featured voices such as the drone attack victims in Pakistan, in the KPK region, and, of course, a powerhouse member of Parliament and women’s rights activist Fawzia Koofi from the Afghan government. So, obviously, we did feature all those diverse voices, because we wanted to have a more robust and well-rounded picture of Afghanistan, and beyond even Afghanistan, just the region and in Pakistan, as well, and how American foreign policy affected them. And I would defer to Brian in terms of, like, just some of the editorial things.

    NERMEEN SHAIKH: Brian, could you respond also to the question of how interviewees were selected?

    BRIAN KNAPPENBERGER: Yeah, we — yeah, I guess I would push back on that a little, that I think we got a pretty wide range of interviews in Afghanistan. We were inside the peace talks at Doha. You know, we talked with the Taliban. We talked with Afghan civilians. Some were in Guantánamo Bay. Some were drone attack victims. We tried to get as broad a picture as we could from the Afghan side, too, including in the historical perspective, interviewing figures like Ismail Khan and Massoud and also Hekmatyar, things like that. So, I think we tried to get as broad a range as possible in the series, and that actually was a priority for us.

    AMY GOODMAN: You know, something that didn’t get a lot of attention in the United States this week, as we come to the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, is what’s happening at Guantánamo.

    BRIAN KNAPPENBERGER: Yeah.

    AMY GOODMAN: The Guantánamo so-called trials. But I first want to go to a clip from Turning Point: 9/11 and the War on Terror that features the U.S. assistant attorney general from 2003 to ’04, Jack Goldsmith, talking about former Vice President Dick Cheney. The clip ends with Mark Fallon, former deputy commander of the Criminal Investigative Task Force at Guantánamo Bay.

    JACK GOLDSMITH: Going back to the Ford White House, when Cheney was chief of staff, at least that far back, Dick Cheney developed a very robust view about the president’s powers under the Constitution, especially as those powers related to national security and war. And his basic view is that when it comes to war and national security, the president is in charge, and he can do what he thinks is necessary, and Congress basically can’t get in the way, and if Congress does get in the way, the president can ignore it. That was his legal view. It was an absolutist view of the president’s powers in wartime.

    VICE PRESIDENT DICK CHENEY: So, it’s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal — disposal, basically, to achieve our objective.

    MARK FALLON: That was frightening to me. It was frightening to hear the vice president of the United States, publicly, on a television show, where he should have been calming the nation down, where he should have been depressurizing, he was upping the pressure, upping the ante. And so I feared that we would do things that would be to our detriment.

    AMY GOODMAN: So, you hear Vice President Dick Cheney, then that last voice, Mark Fallon, former deputy commander of the Criminal Investigative Task Force at Guantánamo Bay. This comes as the five men accused of plotting the September 11th attacks appeared in a Guantánamo Bay military court Tuesday for the first time in over a year. The resumption of the pretrial hearings comes just days ahead of the 20th anniversary of the attacks. The case against the five men includes suspected mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. It’s been riddled with procedural problems, including the admissibility of evidence that was obtained under torture by CIA agents. The pretrial hearings, which have been prolonged for at least nine years, were suspended well over a year ago, in February 2020, due to the pandemic. The selection of a military jury will likely not begin until next year.

    So, Brian Knappenberger, in the documentary series, you interview the lawyer, who has since resigned —

    BRIAN KNAPPENBERGER: Yeah.

    AMY GOODMAN: — saying Guantánamo is — you could say, is in outer space, when it comes to the U.S. justice system, exactly why these men are still being held there, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed waterboarded how many scores of times, put under sleep deprivation for nearly 200 hours. Talk about what’s happening now.

    BRIAN KNAPPENBERGER: Yeah. So, that’s a big part of the series. We look — we trace Guantánamo Bay, what — the decisions that were made in order to initially bring prisoners there, why Guantánamo Bay was chosen in the first place, what we knew about it at the beginning, and we go through — you know, we understand what we know about now what was going on at Guantánamo Bay.

    But we also kind of focus in on the military commissions process, which has been a kind of stop-and-start process over years, which has really been described to me as a kind of Potemkin village sort of set up, where people have been — this kind of military trial process that has never really worked well. And so, the person you mentioned, Jason Wright, was assigned to be counsel to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. And he believed he would be able to mount a defense for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and realized that the system was set up kind of against him right from the beginning, and eventually couldn’t be a part of it and, kind of in a conscientious way, left that position.

    But it’s been ongoing for a very long time. You’re correct that part of the debate has been evidence that was — that may or may not have come from torture and whether that’s admissible. But it is striking that 20 years after 9/11 we’re still wondering about what to do with the people who attacked us. And I think the fact that that’s just started up again now kind of underscores that point.

    AMY GOODMAN: Let me ask you —

    NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, in —

    AMY GOODMAN: Go ahead, Nermeen.

    NERMEEN SHAIKH: No, I was just going to say, following up on what you said, Brian, it’s not just that the film details the problems with the testimonies given under torture in Guantánamo, but also a very good background on how people were selected by the U.S. military to go to Guantánamo in the first place and the problems associated with getting the wrong people as a result of the bounties that were offered. Could you talk about that?

    BRIAN KNAPPENBERGER: Yeah, it’s one of those kind of striking things, you know, that you go back to and you realize — you know, so much of the war on terror, you just didn’t — you know, you maybe read a press release here or there or a story here and there. But that was one thing that was very striking, how people were rounded up in Afghanistan. There were leaflets dropped from airplanes that were sort of promising rewards for members of al-Qaeda or members — for people to sort of turn in people. And that was tragic, ended up being a very, very tragic part of the story, because, you know, of course, people would turn in their enemies and neighbors that they didn’t like, or just kind of use it — it was abused in all sorts of ways. And so, Mark Fallon, in the series, describes it as “bounty babies,” where a lot of people were just turned over in the kind of rush, and in the fear and anger that came out of that period of time, a lot of innocent people got swept up and sent to Guantánamo Bay. It’s a pretty disturbing part of that story.

    AMY GOODMAN: And we just have a minute, but, Brian Knappenberger, your previous films include We Are Legion about the Anonymous hacktivist collective, and The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz. And that’s significant, given the point that Congressmember Barbara Lee makes. And we’re going to have Congressmember Lee on tomorrow on Democracy Now!, the sole member of Congress who stood up against the authorization of military force right after the 9/11 attacks. But she talks about how the authorization of military attacks was used not only to attack places like Yemen and Somalia, but to create a surveillance state at home. Can you end there, Brian?

    BRIAN KNAPPENBERGER: I think the vote that you just mentioned is one of the most courageous legislative votes in my lifetime. To be the only person that stood up against the AUMF at that moment, when the entire nation was ready to — you know, almost unified in their hunger for war, just shows a leadership that we just don’t — we don’t often see. So, I was profoundly moved by that. And that’s one of the first people I mentioned I wanted to interview when we started this series. She took a — she got many, many death threats. She said she would — I mean, she describes it in the series, the kind of pushback that she got. It’s very, very significant. But she was right, and history has proven her right.

    I was surprised, very surprised, actually, when I asked Alberto Gonzales if that — the architect, one of the architects of the AUMF, about it, and he said that it should also be — we should get rid of it. I was actually surprised by that. I didn’t expect him to say that. But it’s, you know, this open-ended call for war that has brought the United States troops all over the world. It just needs to end. You know, wars — it’s part of the responsibility of Congress to OK wars, and the AUMF has been a way around that. It’s long past time to get rid of it.

    AMY GOODMAN: Brian Knappenberger, director, and Mohammed Ali Naqvi, co-executive producer, of the new five-part Netflix docuseries, Turning Point: 9/11 and the War on Terror.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Many FBI Files on 9/11 Remain Classified. Victims’ Families Want Them Released.

    A U.S. flag and a flower are placed near a victim's name at the National September 11 Memorial & Museum at Ground Zero on September 8, 2021, in New York.

    With families of 9/11 victims threatening to protest his appearance at events commemorating the 20th anniversary of the attacks, President Joe Biden took the notable step last week of ordering the Justice Department and other agencies to disclose new portions of their long-secret files on the Qaida plot.

    The executive order on Sept. 3 appears to stave off the prospect that the president might be picketed on the eve of 9/11 memorial services, just days after the final, chaotic withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan.

    What remains in doubt is whether the declassification of FBI documents will resolve the mysteries that still surround the case or provide evidence to support the families’ claims in a federal lawsuit that the kingdom of Saudi Arabia bears some responsibility for the attacks.

    “He has the power to give us closure,” a spokesperson for the families, Brett Eagleson, said of the president. “He has now made us a promise, but he still needs to fulfill it.”

    The relatives’ years-long fight against Justice Department secrecy has lately centered on a list of 45 FBI documents that the government has identified as relevant to the families’ lawsuit in a federal district court in New York.

    Lawyers for the families said those documents represent only a small fraction of the government files they should be entitled to under a 2018 judge’s order. That order limits the plaintiffs to information on a handful of figures who have been tied to the first two Qaida hijackers to arrive in the United States, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar.

    The two Saudis flew into Los Angeles from Bangkok on Jan. 15, 2000. Although they had been trained as terrorists, they spoke almost no English and had only the vaguest notions about how to operate in a Western society, people who knew them told the FBI after the attacks.

    The pair quickly made their way to a new mosque that the Saudi government had built in Culver City, California, not far from Sony Pictures Studios. During a purportedly chance meeting at a nearby cafe, they were invited to settle in San Diego by Omar al-Bayoumi, a shadowy middle-aged Saudi graduate student who had already been investigated by the FBI as a possible spy for the kingdom.

    The CIA had been following Hazmi and Mihdhar as they met with other Qaida operatives in Malaysia in early January 2000. The agency somehow lost their trail when the hijackers flew with their own Saudi passports to Thailand and on to Los Angeles. Even after the CIA learned in March 2000 that at least one of the terrorists had entered the country, it did not notify the FBI until late August 2001.

    CIA officers would later interrogate the architect of the plot, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, about why he sent the first two hijackers to Southern California and whether they had any support network waiting there. (The bipartisan 9/11 Commission found his account implausible.) But most FBI agents investigating the attacks had limited access to the CIA’s intelligence, and even less of that information has since been made public.

    Among the other potential pieces of evidence that have never emerged from the government’s investigation are closed-circuit videotapes showing Hazmi and Mihdhar’s arrival at Los Angeles International Airport. Former FBI investigators said they were never able to locate any tapes despite their repeated requests, leaving questions whether anyone had met the hijackers’ plane.

    The FBI’s handling of evidence it did gather has raised even sharper questions. Just last week, representatives of the 9/11 families wrote to the Justice Department’s inspector general, Michael Horowitz, asking that he investigate whether the FBI might have deliberately hidden or destroyed some evidence to avoid its disclosure.

    That request followed claims by the government in federal court that it could no longer find some materials and information it had gathered in the inquiry, including FBI witness interviews and telephone records of people linked to the hijackers. Among the items that the bureau has said it had lost is a home video from a party in San Diego where Bayoumi introduced the two hijackers to a group of his friends.

    A report in 2020 by ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine recounted that soon after the FBI launched Operation Encore, a follow-on investigation to the original 9/11 case, in 2007, agents learned that FBI archivists were about to dispose of evidence seized from Bayoumi in the days after the attacks.

    Those materials included a diagram that seemed to show the trajectory of a plane crashing to the ground — resembling the way that American Airlines Flight 77, which Hazmi and Mihdhar helped to hijack, had flown into the Pentagon. A former commercial airline pilot who reviewed the diagram in 2012 told FBI agents there was “a reasonable basis” to suspect that it might have been used in preparation for the attacks, according to a newly disclosed statement in the federal litigation.

    At the center of the 9/11 families’ lawsuit is the theory that Bayoumi and a Saudi religious official based in Los Angeles, Fahad al-Thumairy, provided help to the two hijackers. In an interview with the 9/11 Commission, Bayoumi claimed he had no idea the men were Qaida members. Thumairy told the commission staff he did not even recall meeting the two men.

    Most of the U.S. national security establishment has long discounted the possibility that the Saudi royal family might have knowingly supported the plot. The kingdom viewed Osama bin Laden as a subversive enemy, and the attacks had overwhelmingly negative repercussions for Saudi interests.

    But questions remain about the ties between the Qaida operatives and Saudi religious institutions. Saudi clerics operated with considerable autonomy before 9/11, propagating the kingdom’s conservative Wahhabi doctrine around the world with generous funding from the state. They also supported a number of charities tied to al-Qaida and other militant Islamist groups.

    After 9/11, two teams of FBI investigators began to examine the activities of Saudi religious officials who had been operating in the United States. By 2006, the bureau had quietly forced dozens of accredited diplomats and others to leave the country, usually without filing any criminal charges.

    Operation Encore, which is also referred to as “the subfile case,” concentrated closely on Hazmi and Mihdhar and the people who assisted them in California. But the investigators also left behind big holes: Although they discovered that Bayoumi was not actually studying and was being paid indirectly by a Saudi defense agency, for instance, they were unable to determine whether he had ties to the kingdom’s intelligence services or its religious bureaucracy.

    Encore received little support from senior FBI officials, agents involved in the effort said. It was effectively shut down in 2016, when the chief of a New York counterterrorism task force disbanded the small team of investigators and analysts who were working the case.

    However, as ProPublica revealed last year, a senior analyst on the Encore team left an important marker behind. Before moving on to a new post, other investigators said, the analyst compiled a detailed 16-page summary of the Encore findings and filed it electronically so that it could not be easily deleted from the FBI’s computer system. That document, dated April 4, 2016, is one that Biden specifically ordered the Justice Department to review for declassification “no later” than Sept. 11 of this year.

    Until last month, the Justice Department had argued repeatedly in court that the FBI could not disclose key documents from the 9/11 inquiry because its investigation was ongoing. Since 2017, though, virtually no significant investigative activity has been cited in FBI files that have been shared with lawyers for the families.

    During his campaign, Biden wrote to the 9/11 families that he supported their quest for “full truth and accountability” in the attacks, promising new transparency if he was elected. After more than 1,700 family members warned him to avoid memorial events this year unless he made good on his pledge, the Justice Department announced on Aug. 9 that the FBI had finally closed the Encore investigation and would work to “identify additional information appropriate for disclosure.”

    That wasn’t good enough, the families responded. As they moved forward with plans for anti-Biden protests one day before the 20th anniversary, the president issued his executive order.

    The aggressive secrecy of the Justice Department peaked under the Trump administration and former Attorney General William Barr, who asserted in 2019 that materials from the FBI investigation must be protected as state secrets. But efforts to safeguard both intelligence sources and Saudi sensitivities date back to the Bush and Obama administrations.

    “The Bush administration was cozy with the Saudis, and Obama didn’t want to fight and was concerned about keeping Saudi support because of ISIS,” one former senior intelligence official said. “Now, there is an opportunity for this administration to say, yes, the Saudi relationship is important, but we can take a different approach to this issue.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • How Can America Wake Up From Its Post-9/11 Nightmare?

    Looking back on it now, the 1990s were an age of innocence for America. The Cold War was over and our leaders promised us a “peace dividend.” There was no TSA to make us take off our shoes at airports (how many bombs have they found in those billions of shoes?). The government could not tap a U.S. phone or read private emails without a warrant from a judge. And the national debt was only $5 trillion – compared with over $28 trillion today.

    We have been told that the criminal attacks of September 11, 2001 “changed everything.” But what really changed everything was the U.S. government’s disastrous response to them.

    That response was not preordained or inevitable, but the result of decisions and choices made by politicians, bureaucrats and generals who fueled and exploited our fears, unleashed wars of reprehensible vengeance and built a secretive security state, all thinly disguised behind Orwellian myths of American greatness.

    Most Americans believe in democracy and many regard the United States as a democratic country. But the U.S. response to 9/11 laid bare the extent to which American leaders are willing to manipulate the public into accepting illegal wars, torture, the Guantanamo gulag and sweeping civil rights abuses — activities that undermine the very meaning of democracy.

    Former Nuremberg prosecutor Ben Ferencz said in a speech in 2011 that “a democracy can only work if its people are being told the truth.” But America’s leaders exploited the public’s fears in the wake of 9/11 to justify wars that have killed and maimed millions of people who had nothing to do with those crimes. Ferencz compared this to the actions of the German leaders he prosecuted at Nuremberg, who also justified their invasions of other countries as “preemptive first strikes.”

    “You cannot run a country as Hitler did, feeding them a pack of lies to frighten them that they’re being threatened, so it’s justified to kill people you don’t even know,” Ferencz continued. “It’s not logical, it’s not decent, it’s not moral, and it’s not helpful. When an unmanned bomber from a secret American airfield fires rockets into a little Pakistani or Afghan village and thereby kills or maims unknown numbers of innocent people, what is the effect of that? Every victim will hate America forever and will be willing to die killing as many Americans as possible. Where there is no court of justice, wild vengeance is the alternative.”

    Even the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, talked about “insurgent math,” conjecturing that, for every innocent person killed, the U.S. created 10 new enemies. And thus the so-called Global War on Terror fueled a global explosion of terrorism and armed resistance that will not end unless and until the United States ends the state terrorism that provokes and fuels it.

    By opportunistically exploiting 9/11 to attack countries that had nothing to do with it, like Iraq, Somalia, Libya, Syria and Yemen, the United States vastly expanded the destructive strategy it used in the 1980s to destabilize Afghanistan, which spawned the Taliban and Al Qaeda in the first place.

    In Libya and Syria, only ten years after 9/11, U.S. leaders betrayed every American who lost a loved one on September 11th by recruiting and arming Al Qaeda-led militants to overthrow two of the most secular governments in the Middle East, plunging both countries into years of intractable violence and fueling radicalization throughout the region.

    The U.S. response to 9/11 was corrupted by a toxic soup of revenge, imperialist ambitions, war profiteering, systematic brainwashing and sheer stupidity. The only Republican Senator who voted against the war on Iraq, Lincoln Chafee, later wrote, “Helping a rogue president start an unnecessary war should be a career-ending lapse of judgment.”

    But it wasn’t. Very few of the 263 Republicans or the 110 Democrats who voted for the Iraq war in 2002 paid any political price for their complicity in international aggression, which the judges at Nuremberg explicitly called “the supreme international crime.” One of them now sits at the apex of power in the White House.

    Trump and Biden’s withdrawal and implicit acceptance of the U.S. defeat in Afghanistan could serve as an important step toward ending the violence and chaos their predecessors unleashed after the September 11th attack. But the current debate over next year’s military budget makes it clear that our deluded leaders are still dodging the obvious lessons of 20 years of war.

    Barbara Lee, the only Member of Congress with the wisdom and courage to vote against Congress’s war resolution in 2001, has introduced a bill to cut U.S. military spending by almost half:  $350 billion per year. With the miserable failure in Afghanistan, a war that will end up costing every U.S. citizen $20,000, one would think that Rep. Lee’s proposal would be eliciting tremendous support. But the White House, the Pentagon and the Armed Services Committees in the House and Senate are instead falling over each other to shovel even more money into the bottomless pit of the military budget.

    Politicians’ votes on questions of war, peace and military spending are the most reliable test of their commitment to progressive values and the well-being of their constituents. You cannot call yourself a progressive or a champion of working people if you vote to appropriate more money for weapons and war than for healthcare, education, green jobs and fighting poverty.

    These 20 years of war have revealed to Americans and the world that modern weapons and formidable military forces can only accomplish two things: kill and maim people; and destroy homes, infrastructure and entire cities. American promises to rebuild bombed-out cities and “remake” countries it has destroyed have proven worthless, as Biden has acknowledged.

    Both Iraq and Afghanistan are turning primarily to China for the help they need to start rebuilding and developing economically from the ruin and devastation left by America and its allies. America destroys, China builds. The contrast could not be more stark or self-evident. No amount of Western propaganda can hide what the whole world can see.

    But the different paths chosen by U.S. and Chinese leaders are not predestined, and despite the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the U.S. corporate media, the American public has always been wiser and more committed to cooperative diplomacy than America’s political and executive class. It has been well-documented that many of the endless crises in U.S. foreign policy could have been avoided if America’s leaders had just listened to the public.

    The perennial handicap that has dogged America’s diplomacy since World War II is precisely our investment in weapons and military forces, including nuclear weapons that threaten our very existence. It is trite but true to say that, ”when the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.”

    Other countries don’t have the option of deploying overwhelming military force to confront international problems, so they have had to be smarter and more nimble in their diplomacy, and more prudent and selective in their more limited uses of military force.

    The rote declarations of U.S. leaders that “all options are on the table” are a euphemism for precisely the “threat or use of force” that the UN Charter explicitly prohibits, and they stymie the U.S. development of expertise in nonviolent forms of conflict resolution. The bumbling and bombast of America’s leaders in international arenas stand in sharp contrast to the skillful diplomacy and clear language we often hear from top Russian, Chinese and Iranian diplomats, even when they are speaking in English, their second or third language.

    By contrast, U.S. leaders rely on threats, coups, sanctions and war to project power around the world. They promise Americans that these coercive methods will maintain American “leadership” or dominance indefinitely into the future, as if that is America’s rightful place in the world: sitting atop the globe like a cowboy on a bucking bronco.

    A “New American Century” and “Pax Americana” are Orwellian versions of Hitler’s “Thousand-Year Reich,” but are no more realistic. No empire has lasted forever, and there is historical evidence that even the most successful empires have a lifespan of no more than 250 years, by which time their rulers have enjoyed so much wealth and power that decadence and decline inevitably set in. This describes the United States today.

    America’s economic dominance is waning. Its once productive economy has been gutted and financialized, and most countries in the world now do more trade with China and/or the European Union than with the United States. Where America’s military once kicked open doors for American capital to “follow the flag” and open up new markets, today’s U.S. war machine is just a bull in the global china shop, wielding purely destructive power.

    But we are not condemned to passively follow the suicidal path of militarism and hostility. Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan could be a down payment on a transition to a more peaceful post-imperial economy — if the American public starts to actively demand peace, diplomacy and disarmament and find ways to make our voices heard.

    — We must get serious about demanding cuts in the Pentagon budget. None of our other problems will be solved as long as we keep allowing our leaders to flush the majority of federal discretionary spending down the same military toilet as the $2.26 trillion they wasted on the war in Afghanistan. We must oppose politicians who refuse to cut the Pentagon budget, regardless of which party they belong to and where they stand on other issues. CODEPINK is part of a new coalition to “Cut the Pentagon for the people, planet, peace and a future” — please join us!

    — We must not let ourselves or our family members be recruited into the U.S. war machine. Instead, we must challenge our leaders’ absurd claims that the imperial forces deployed across the world to threaten other countries are somehow, by some convoluted logic, defending America. As a translator paraphrased Voltaire, “Whoever can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”

    — We must expose the ugly, destructive reality behind our country’s myths of “defending U.S. vital interests,” “humanitarian intervention,” “the war on terror” and the latest absurdity, the ill-defined “rules-based order” whose rules only apply to others — never to the United States.

    — And we must oppose the corrupt power of the arms industry, including U.S. weapons sales to the world’s most repressive regimes and an unwinnable arms race that risks a potentially world-ending conflict with China and Russia.

    Our only hope for the future is to abandon the futile quest for hegemony and instead commit to peace, cooperative diplomacy, international law and disarmament. After 20 years of war and militarism that has only left the world a more dangerous place and accelerated America’s decline, we must choose the path of peace.

    The post How Can America Wake Up From Its Post-9/11 Nightmare? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Unlearnt Lessons Of 9/11, Twenty Years Out

    Twenty years after 9/11, America is less safe, a deeply troubled country, ravaged by COVID, racism, inequality, extreme weather from global warming and political strife. Its political leaders have embraced an Orwellian approach to the truth in which war is peace and large segments of our society are polarized by widely divergent concepts of reality.

    On the afternoon of 9/11, with the American media joining with the leaders of the two major parties in banging the drum for war, I wrote one of the first statements calling for America to seek peace instead, to not turn our cries of grief into a call for war. Eventually, many joined with early voices such as those of the Green Party and the War Resisters League in warning that peace and freedom both at home and abroad would be undermined if the United States went to war instead of participating in international criminal prosecution of this crime against humanity.

    The post The Unlearnt Lessons Of 9/11, Twenty Years Out appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • United States: The racist War on Terror after 9/11

    After the attack on the World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001, United States president George W Bush gained unlimited powers to fight “forever wars”, writes Malik Miah. Meanwhile, Arabs and those who “looked Muslim” — especially Iranians and South Asians — became domestic targets at home.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • Noam Chomsky: The US-Led “War on Terror” Has Devastated Much of the World

    U.S. Army soldiers patrol

    Twenty years ago this week, the terrorist organization al-Qaeda, whose origins date back to 1979 when Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan, hijacked four airplanes and carried out suicide attacks against the Twin Towers and the Pentagon in the United States. Shortly thereafter, the administration of George W. Bush embarked on a “global war on terror”: It invaded Afghanistan and, a year later, after having toppled the Taliban government, raised the specter of an “Axis of Evil” comprising Iraq, Iran and North Korea, thereby preparing the stage for more invasions. Interestingly enough, Saudi Arabia, whose royal family, according to certain intelligence reports, had been financing al-Qaeda, was not included on the list. Instead, it was Iraq that the U.S. invaded in 2003, toppling a brutal dictator (Saddam Hussein) who had committed most of his crimes as a U.S. ally and was a sworn enemy of al-Qaeda and of other Islamic fundamentalist terrorist organizations because of the threat they posed to his secular regime.

    The outcome of the 20-year war on terror, which ended with the Taliban’s return to power, has been disastrous on multiple fronts, as Noam Chomsky pointedly elaborates in a breathtaking interview, which also reveals the massive level of hypocrisy that belies the actions of the global empire.

    C.J. Polychroniou: Nearly 20 years have passed since the September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001. With nearly 3,000 dead, this was the deadliest attack on U.S. soil in history and produced dramatic ramifications for global affairs, as well as startling impacts on domestic society. I want to start by asking you to reflect on the alleged revamping of U.S. foreign policy under George W. Bush as part of his administration’s reaction to the rise of Osama bin Laden and the jihadist phenomenon. First, was there anything new to the Bush Doctrine, or was it simply a codification of what we had already seen take place in the 1990s in Iraq, Panama, Bosnia and Kosovo? Second, was the U.S.-NATO led invasion of Afghanistan legal under international law? And third, was the U.S. ever committed to nation-building in Afghanistan?

    Noam Chomsky: Washington’s immediate reaction to 9/11/2001 was to invade Afghanistan. The withdrawal of U.S. ground forces was timed to (virtually) coincide with the 20th anniversary of the invasion. There has been a flood of commentary on the 9/11 anniversary and the termination of the ground war. It is highly illuminating, and consequential. It reveals how the course of events is perceived by the political class, and provides useful background for considering the substantive questions about the Bush Doctrine. It also yields some indication of what is likely to ensue.

    Of utmost importance at this historic moment would be the reflections of “the decider,” as he called himself. And indeed, there was an interview with George W. Bush as the withdrawal reached its final stage, in the Washington Post.

    In the Style section.

    The article and interview introduce us to a lovable, goofy grandpa, enjoying banter with his children, admiring the portraits he had painted of Great Men that he had known in his days of glory. There was an incidental comment on his exploits in Afghanistan and the follow-up episode in Iraq:

    Bush may have started the Iraq War on false pretenses, but at least he hadn’t inspired an insurrection that turned the U.S. Capitol into a combat zone. At least he had made efforts to distance himself from the racists and xenophobes in his party rather than cultivate their support. At least he hadn’t gone so far as to call his domestic adversaries “evil.”

    “He looks like the Babe Ruth of presidents when you compare him to Trump,” former Senate Majority Leader and one-time Bush nemesis Harry M. Reid (D-Nevada) said in an interview. “Now, I look back on Bush with a degree of nostalgia, with some affection, which I never thought I would do.”

    Way down on the list, meriting only incidental allusion, is the slaughter of hundreds of thousands; many millions of refugees; vast destruction; a regime of hideous torture; incitement of ethnic conflicts that have torn the whole region apart; and as a direct legacy, two of the most miserable countries on Earth.

    First things first. He didn’t bad-mouth fellow Americans.

    The sole interview with Bush captures well the essence of the flood of commentary. What matters is us. There are many laments about the cost of these ventures: the cost to us, that is, which “have exceeded $8 trillion, according to new estimates by the Costs of War project at Brown University,” along with American lives lost and disruption of our fragile society.

    Next time we should assess the costs to us more carefully, and do better.

    There are also well-justified laments about the fate of women under Taliban rule. The laments sometimes are no doubt sincere, though a natural question arises: Why weren’t they voiced 30 years ago when U.S. favorites, armed and enthusiastically supported by Washington, were terrorizing young women in Kabul who were wearing the “wrong” clothes, throwing acid in their faces and other abuses? Particularly vicious were the forces of the arch-terrorist, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, recently on the U.S. negotiating team.

    The achievements in women’s rights in Russian-controlled cities in the late ‘80s, and the threats they faced from the CIA-mobilized radical Islamist forces, were reported at the time by a highly credible source, Rasil Basu, a distinguished international feminist activist who was UN representative in Afghanistan in those years, with special concern for women’s rights.

    Basu reports:

    During the [Russian] occupation, in fact, women made enormous strides: illiteracy declined from 98% to 75%, and they were granted equal rights with men in civil law, and in the Constitution. This is not to say that there was complete gender equality. Unjust patriarchal relations still prevailed in the workplace and in the family with women occupying lower level sex-type jobs. But the strides they took in education and employment were very impressive.

    Basu submitted articles on these matters to the major U.S. journals, along with the feminist journal Ms. Magazine. No takers, wrong story. She was, however, able to publish her report in Asia: Asian Age, on December 3, 2001.

    We can learn more about how Afghans in Kabul perceive the late years of the Russian occupation, and what followed, from another expert source, Rodric Braithwaite, British ambassador to Moscow from 1988 to 1992, and then chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, also author of the major scholarly work on the Soviets in Afghanistan.

    Braithwaite visited Kabul in 2008, and reported his findings in the London Financial Times:

    In Afghanistan today new myths are building up. They bode ill for current western policy. On a recent visit I spoke to Afghan journalists, former Mujahideen, professionals, people working for the ‘coalition’ — natural supporters for its claims to bring peace and reconstruction. They were contemptuous of [US-imposed] President Hamid Karzai, whom they compared to Shah Shujah, the British puppet installed during the first Afghan war. Most preferred Mohammad Najibullah, the last communist president, who attempted to reconcile the nation within an Islamic state, and was butchered by the Taliban in 1996: DVDs of his speeches are being sold on the streets. Things were, they said, better under the Soviets. Kabul was secure, women were employed, the Soviets built factories, roads, schools and hospitals, Russian children played safely in the streets. The Russian soldiers fought bravely on the ground like real warriors, instead of killing women and children from the air. Even the Taliban were not so bad: they were good Muslims, kept order, and respected women in their own way. These myths may not reflect historical reality, but they do measure a deep disillusionment with the ‘coalition’ and its policies.

    The policies of the “coalition” were brought to the public in New York Times correspondent Tim Weiner’s history of the CIA. The goal was to “kill Soviet Soldiers,” the CIA station chief in Islamabad declared, making it clear that “the mission was not to liberate Afghanistan.”

    His understanding of the policies he was ordered to execute under President Ronald Reagan is fully in accord with the boasts of President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski about their decision to support radical Islamist jihadis in 1979 in order to draw the Russians into Afghanistan, and his pleasure in the outcome after hundreds of thousands of Afghans were killed and much of the country wrecked: “What is more important in world history? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some agitated Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?”

    It was recognized early on by informed observers that the Russian invaders were eager to withdraw without delay. The study of Russian archives by historian David Gibbs resolves any doubts on the matter. But it was much more useful for Washington to issue rousing proclamations about Russia’s terrifying expansionist goals, compelling the U.S., in defense, to greatly expand its own domination of the region, with violence when needed (the Carter Doctrine, a precursor of the Bush Doctrine).

    The Russian withdrawal left a relatively popular government in place under Najibullah, with a functioning army that was able to hold its own for several years until the U.S.-backed radical Islamists took over and instituted a reign of terror so extreme that the Taliban were widely welcomed when they invaded, instituting their own harsh regime. They kept on fairly good terms with Washington until 9/11.

    Returning to the present, we should indeed be concerned with the fate of women, and others, as the Taliban return to power. For those sincerely concerned to design policies that might benefit them, a little historical memory doesn’t hurt.

    The same is true in other respects as well. The Taliban have promised not to harbor terrorists, but how can we believe them, commentators warn, when this promise is coupled with the outrageous claim by their spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid that there is “no proof” that Osama bin Laden was responsible for the 9/11 attack?

    There is one problem with the general ridicule of this shocking statement. What Mujahid actually said was both accurate and very much worth hearing. In his words, “When Osama bin Laden became an issue for the Americans, he was in Afghanistan. Although there was no proof he was involved” in 9/11.

    Let’s check. In June 2002, eight months after 9/11, FBI Director Robert Mueller made his most extensive presentation to the national press about the results of what was probably the most intensive investigation in history. In his words, “investigators believe the idea of the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon came from al Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan,” though the plotting and financing apparently trace to Germany and the United Arab Emirates. “We think the masterminds of it were in Afghanistan, high in the al Qaeda leadership.”

    What was only surmised in June 2002 could not have been known eight months earlier when the U.S. invaded. Mujahid’s outrageous comment was accurate. The ridicule is another example of convenient amnesia.

    Keeping Mujahid’s accurate statement in mind, along with Mueller’s confirmation of it, we can move towards understanding the Bush Doctrine.

    While doing so, we might listen to Afghan voices. One of the most respected was Abdul Haq, the leading figure in the anti-Taliban Afghan resistance and a former leader of the U.S.-backed Mujahideen resistance to the Russian invasion. A few weeks after the U.S. invasion, he had an interview with Asia scholar Anatol Lieven.

    Haq bitterly condemned the U.S. invasion, which, he recognized, would kill many Afghans and undermine the efforts to overthrow the Taliban from within. He said that “the US is trying to show its muscle, score a victory and scare everyone in the world. They don’t care about the suffering of the Afghans or how many people we will lose.”

    Haq was not alone in this view. A meeting of 1,000 tribal elders in October 2001 unanimously demanded an end to the bombing, which, they declared, is targeting “innocent people.” They urged that means other than slaughter and destruction be employed to overthrow the hated Taliban regime.

    The leading Afghan women’s rights organization, Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), issued a declaration on October 11, 2001, strongly opposing the “vast aggression on our country” by the U.S., which will shed the blood of innocent civilians. The declaration called for “eradication of the plague of the Taliban and al-Qaeda” by the “uprising of the Afghan nation,” not by a murderous assault of foreign aggressors.

    All public at the time, all ignored as irrelevant, all forgotten. The opinions of Afghans are not our concern when we invade and occupy their country.

    The perception of the anti-Taliban Afghan resistance was not far from the stance of President Bush and his Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Both dismissed Taliban initiatives to send bin Laden for trial abroad despite Washington’s refusal to provide evidence (which it didn’t have). Finally, they refused Taliban offers to surrender. As the president put it, “When I said no negotiations, I meant no negotiations.” Rumsfeld added, “We don’t negotiate surrenders.” E.g., we’re going to show our muscle and scare everyone in the world.

    The imperial pronouncement at the time was that those who harbor terrorists are as guilty as the terrorists themselves. The shocking audacity of that proclamation passed almost unnoticed. It was not accompanied by a call to bomb Washington, as it obviously implied. Even putting aside the world-class terrorists in high places, the U.S. harbors and abets retail terrorists who keep to such acts as blowing up Cuban commercial airliners, killing many people, part of the long U.S. terrorist war against Cuba.

    Quite apart from that scandal, it is worth stating the unspeakable: The U.S. had no charge against the Taliban. No charge, before 9/11 or ever. Before 9/11, Washington was on fairly good terms with the Taliban. After 9/11, it demanded extradition (without even a pretense of providing required evidence), and when the Taliban agreed, Washington refused the offers: “We don’t negotiate surrenders.” The invasion was not only a violation of international law, as marginal a concern in Washington as the anti-Taliban Afghan resistance, but also had no credible pretext on any grounds.

    Pure criminality.

    Furthermore, ample evidence is now available showing that Afghanistan and al-Qaeda were not of much interest to the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld triumvirate. They had their eyes on much bigger game than Afghanistan. Iraq would be the first step, then the entire region. I won’t review the record here. It’s well-documented in Scott Horton’s book, Fool’s Errand.

    That’s the Bush Doctrine. Rule the region, rule the world, show our muscle so that the world knows that “What we say goes,” as Bush I [George H.W. Bush] put it.

    It’s hardly a new U.S. doctrine. It’s also easy to find precursors in imperial history. Simply consider our predecessor in world control, Britain, a grand master of war crimes, whose wealth and power derived from piracy, slavery and the world’s greatest narco-trafficking enterprise.

    And in the last analysis, “Whatever happens, we have got, The Maxim gun, and they have not.” Hilaire Belloc’s rendition of Western civilization. And pretty much Abdul Haq’s insight into the imperial mindset.

    Nothing reveals reigning values more clearly than the mode of withdrawal. The Afghan population was scarcely a consideration. The imperial “deciders” do not trouble to ask what people might want in the rural areas of this overwhelmingly rural society where the Taliban live and find their support, perhaps grudging support as the best of bad alternatives. Formerly a Pashtun movement, the “new Taliban” evidently have a much broader base. That was dramatically revealed by the quick collapse of their former enemies, the vicious warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum, along with Ismail Khan, bringing other ethnic groups within the Taliban network. There are also Afghan peace forces that should not be summarily dismissed. What would the Afghan population want if they had a choice? Could they, perhaps, reach local accommodations if given time before a precipitous withdrawal? Whatever the possibilities might have been, they do not seem to have been considered.

    The depth of contempt for Afghans was, predictably, reached by Donald Trump. In his unilateral withdrawal agreement with the Taliban in February 2020, he did not even bother to consult with the official Afghan government. Worse still, Bush administration foreign policy specialist Kori Schake reports, Trump forced the Afghan government to release 5,000 Taliban fighters and relax economic sanctions. He agreed that the Taliban could continue to commit violence against the government we were there to support, against innocent people and against those who’d assisted our efforts to keep Americans safe. All the Taliban had to do was say they would stop targeting U.S. or coalition forces, not permit al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations to use Afghan territory to threaten U.S. security and subsequently hold negotiations with the Afghan government.

    As usual, what matters is us, this time amplified by Trump’s signature cruelty. The fate of Afghans is of zero concern.

    Trump timed the withdrawal for the onset of the summer fighting season, reducing the hope for some kind of preparation. President Joe Biden improved the terms of withdrawal a little, but not enough to prevent the anticipated debacle. Then came the predictable reaction of the increasingly shameless Republican leadership. They were barely able to remove their gushing tributes to Trump’s “historic peace agreement” from their web page in time to denounce Biden and call for his impeachment for pursuing an improved version of Trump’s ignominious betrayal.

    Meanwhile, the Afghans are again hung out to dry.

    Returning to the original question, the Bush Doctrine may have been formulated more crudely than the usual practice, but it is hardly new. The invasion violated international law (and Article VI of the U.S. Constitution), but Bush’s legal team had determined that such sentimentality was “quaint” and “obsolete,” again breaking little new ground except for brazen defiance. As to “nation building,” one way to measure the commitment to this goal is to ask what portion of the trillions of dollars expended went to the Afghan population, and what portion went to the U.S. military system and its mercenaries (“contractors”) along with the morass of corruption in Kabul and the warlords the U.S. established in power.

    At the outset, I referred to 9/11/2001, not just 9/11. There’s a good reason. What we call 9/11 is the second 9/11. The first 9/11 was far more destructive and brutal by any reasonable measure: 9/11/73. To see why, consider per capita equivalents, the right measure. Suppose that on 9/11/2001, 30,000 people had been killed, 500,000 viciously tortured, the government overthrown and a brutal dictatorship installed. That would have been worse than what we call 9/11.

    It happened. It wasn’t deplored by the U.S. government, or by private capital, or by the international financial institutions that the U.S. largely controls, or by the leading figures of “libertarianism.” Rather, it was lauded and granted enormous support. The perpetrators, like Henry Kissinger, are highly honored. I suppose bin Laden is lauded among jihadis.

    All should recognize that I am referring to Chile, 9/11/1973.

    Another topic that might inspire reflection is the notion of “forever wars,” finally put to rest with the withdrawal from Afghanistan. From the perspective of the victims, when did the forever wars begin? For the United States, they began in 1783. With the British yoke removed, the new nation was free to invade “Indian country,” to attack Indigenous nations with campaigns of slaughter, terror, ethnic cleansing, violation of treaties — all on a massive scale, meanwhile picking up half of Mexico, then onto much of the world. A longer view traces our forever wars back to 1492, as historian Walter Hixson argues.

    From the viewpoint of the victims, history looks different from the stance of those with the maxim gun and their descendants.

    In March 2003, the U.S. initiated a war against Iraq as part of the neoconservative vision of remaking the Middle East and removing leaders that posed a threat to the interests and “integrity” of the United States. Knowing that the regime of Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the 9/11 terrorist attacks, possessed no weapons of mass destruction and subsequently posed no threat to the U.S., why did Bush invade Iraq, which left hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead and may have cost more than $3 trillion?

    9/11 provided the occasion for the invasion of Iraq, which, unlike Afghanistan, is a real prize: a major petro-state right at the heart of the world’s prime oil-producing region. As the twin towers were still smoldering, Rumsfeld was telling his staff that it’s time to “go massive — sweep it all up, things related and not,” including Iraq. Goals quickly became far more expansive. Bush and associates made it quite clear that bin Laden was small potatoes, of little interest (see Horton for many details).

    The Bush legal team determined that the UN Charter, which explicitly bars preemptive/preventive wars, actually authorizes them — formalizing what had long been operative doctrine. The official reason for war was the “single question”: Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. When the question received the wrong answer, the reason for aggression instantly switched to “democracy promotion,” a transparent fairy tale swallowed enthusiastically by the educated classes — though some demurred, including 99 percent of Iraqis, according to polls.

    Some are now praised for having opposed the war from the start, notably Barack Obama, who criticized it as a strategic blunder. Perhaps my memory is faulty, but I don’t recall praise for Nazi generals who regarded Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa as a strategic blunder: They should have knocked out Britain first. A different judgment was rendered by the Nuremberg Tribunal. But the U.S. doesn’t commit crimes, by definition; only blunders.

    The regime-change agenda that had defined U.S. foreign policy under the Bush administration was apparently behind NATO’s decision to remove Muammar Qaddafi from power in Libya in the wake of the “Arab Spring” revolutions in late 2010 and early 2011. But as in the case of Iraq, what were the real reasons for dealing with the leader of an alleged “rogue state” that had long ceased being one?

    The Libya intervention was initiated by France, partly in reaction to humanitarian posturing of some French intellectuals, partly I suppose (we don’t have much evidence) as part of France’s effort to sustain its imperial role in Francophone Africa. Britain joined in. Then Obama-Clinton joined, “leading from behind” as some White House official is supposed to have said. As Qaddafi’s forces were converging on Benghazi, there were loud cries of impending genocide, leading to a UN Security Council resolution imposing a no-fly zone and calling for negotiations. That was reasonable in my opinion; there were legitimate concerns. The African Union proposed a ceasefire with negotiations with the Benghazi rebel about reforms. Qaddafi accepted it; the rebels refused.

    At that point, the France-Britain-U.S. coalition decided to violate the Security Council resolution they had introduced and to become, in effect, the air force of the rebels. That enabled the rebel forces to advance on ground, finally capturing and sadistically murdering Qaddafi. Hillary Clinton found that quite amusing, and joked with the press that, “We came, We saw, He died.”

    The country then collapsed into total chaos, with sharp escalation in killings and other atrocities. It also led to a flow of jihadis and weapons to other parts of Africa, stirring up major disasters there. Intervention extended to Russia and Turkey, and the Arab dictatorships, supporting warring groups. The whole episode has been a catastrophe for Libya and much of West Africa. Clinton is not on record, as far as I know, as to whether this is also amusing.

    Libya was a major oil producer. It’s hard to doubt that that was a factor in the various interventions, but lacking internal records, little can be said with confidence.

    The debacle in Afghanistan has shown beyond any doubt the failure of U.S. strategy in the war on terror and of the regime-change operations. However, there is something more disturbing than these facts, which is that, after each intervention, the United States leaves behind “black holes” and even betrays those that fought on its side against terrorism. Two interrelated questions: First, do you think that the failed war on terror will produce any new lessons for future U.S. foreign policymakers? And second, does this failure reveal anything about U.S. supremacy in world affairs?

    Failure is in the eyes of the beholder. Let’s first recall that Bush II didn’t declare the global war on terror. He re-declared it. It was Reagan and his Secretary of State George Shultz who came into office declaring the global war on terror, a campaign to destroy the “the evil scourge of terrorism,” particularly state-backed international terrorism, a “plague spread by depraved opponents of civilization itself [in a] return to barbarism in the modern age.”

    The global war on terror quickly became a huge terrorist war directed or supported by Washington, concentrating on Central America but extending to the Middle East, Africa and Asia. The global war on terror even led to a World Court judgment condemning the Reagan administration for “unlawful use of force” — aka, international terrorism — and ordering the U.S. to pay substantial reparations for its crimes.

    The U.S. of course dismissed all of this and stepped up the “unlawful use of force.” That was quite proper, the editors of The New York Times explained. The World Court was a “hostile forum,” as proven by the fact that it condemned the blameless U.S. A few years earlier it had been a model of probity when it sided with the U.S. in a case against Iran.

    The U.S. then vetoed a Security Council resolution calling on all states to observe international law, mentioning no one, although it was clear what was intended. I’m not sure whether it was even reported.

    But we solemnly declare that states that harbor terrorists are as guilty as the terrorists themselves. So the invasion of Afghanistan was “right” and “just,” though ill-conceived and too costly. To us.

    Was it a failure? For U.S. imperial goals? In some cases, yes. Reagan was the last supporter of the Apartheid regime in South Africa, but was unable to sustain it. In general, though, it extended Washington’s imperial reach.

    Bush’s renewal of the global war on terror has not had similar success. When the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, the base for radical Islamic fundamentalist terrorism was largely confined to a corner of Afghanistan. Now it is all over the world. The devastation of much of Central Asia and the Middle East has not enhanced U.S. power.

    I doubt that it has much impact on U.S. global supremacy, which remains overwhelming. In the military dimension, the U.S. stands alone. Its military spending eclipses rivals — in 2020, $778 billion as compared to China’s $252 billion and Russia’s $62 billion. The U.S. military is also far more advanced technologically. U.S. security is unrivaled. The alleged threats are at the borders of enemies, which are ringed with nuclear-armed missiles in some of the 800 U.S. military bases around the world (China has one: Djibouti).

    Power also has economic dimensions. At the peak of U.S. power after World War II, the U.S. had perhaps 40 percent of global wealth, a preponderance that inevitably declined. But as political economist Sean Starrs has observed, in the world of neoliberal globalization, national accounts are not the only measure of economic power. His research shows that U.S.-based multinationals control a staggering 50 percent of global wealth and are first (sometimes second) in just about every sector.

    Another dimension is “soft power.” Here, America has seriously declined, well before Trump’s harsh blows to the country’s reputation. Even under Clinton, leading political scientists recognized that most of the world regarded America as the world’s “prime rogue state” and “the single greatest external threat to their societies” (to quote Samuel Huntington and Robert Jervis, respectively). In the Obama years, international polls found that the U.S. was considered the greatest threat to world peace, with no contender even close.

    U.S. leaders can continue to undermine the country, if they choose, but its enormous power and unrivaled advantages make that a hard task, even for the Trump wrecking ball.

    A look back at the 9/11 attacks also reveals that the war on terror had numerous consequences on domestic society in the U.S. Can you comment on the impact of the war on terror on American democracy and human rights?

    In this regard, the topic has been well enough covered so that not much comment is necessary. Another illustration just appeared in The New York Times Review of the Week, the eloquent testimony by a courageous FBI agent who was so disillusioned by his task of “destroying people” (Muslims) in the war on terror that he decided to leak documents exposing the crimes and to go to prison. That fate is reserved to those who expose state crimes, not the perpetrators, who are respected, like the goofy grandpa, George W. Bush.

    There has of course been a serious assault on civil liberties and human rights, in some cases utterly unspeakable, like Guantánamo, where tortured prisoners still languish after many years without charges or because the torture was so hideous that judges refuse to allow them to be brought to trial. It’s by now conceded that “the worst of the worst” (as they were called) were mostly innocent bystanders.

    At home, the framework of a surveillance state with utterly illegitimate power has been established. The victims as usual are the most vulnerable, but others might want to reflect on Pastor Niemöller’s famous plea under Nazi rule.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • White House’s release of declassified 9/11 documents may implicate Saudi royal family

    US president Joe Biden recently announced that he will sign an executive order to facilitate the release of classified documents about the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The move is the result of a long-running campaign by victims’ families to determine whether the government of Saudi Arabia played a hand in the atrocities.

    Throughout the 20 years since the attacks, it appears that successive US administrations and the US intelligence community alike have gone out of their way to suppress evidence that might implicate one of Washington’s staunchest allies. This refusal to release the documents speaks volumes about the US’s fawning treatment of one of the world’s last remaining absolute monarchies. It also raises big questions about the US’s flagrant double standards in the Middle East during its so-called ‘War on Terror’.

    Documents finally redacted after three presidents in a row refuse

    On 3 September, Biden ordered the US Justice Department to release documents produced as part of a Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) probe into the 9/11 attacks. Groups representing families of 9/11 victims have lobbied hard for years for their release. In response, Biden committed to declassifying the documents during his 2020 presidential campaign.

    As the anniversary of the attacks approached, these groups released a statement urging Biden not to attend memorial events unless his administration declassified the documents. The administrations of former presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump all refused to do so.

    Saudi involvement?

    Many victims’ families have been particularly motivated by a suspicion that the government of Saudi Arabia might have been involved in planning the attacks. On 3 September, Reuters reported:

    Family members of victims of the Sept. 11 attacks asked a U.S. government watchdog on Thursday to investigate their suspicions that the FBI lied about or destroyed evidence linking Saudi Arabia to the hijackers.

    These suspicions have been heightened by the fact that Saudi Arabia is, after Israel, the US’s second staunchest ally in the Middle East. Throughout the presidencies of Donald Trump, Barack Obama, and George W. Bush, Washington all entered into profitable arms deals with the country’s royal family. Successive US administrations, therefore, have had an incentive to suppress information that could reveal Saudi involvement in 9/11. Politico reported in April 2017 that the 9/11 Commission’s “own members protested drastic, last-minute edits that seemed to absolve the Saudi government of any responsibility”.

    Bogus justification for meddling in the Middle East

    But the reality is that Washington’s deceitfulness runs even deeper. Because the 9/11 attacks were used as a ruse to provide bogus justification for the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq to topple the Taliban and the Ba’athist government of Saddam Hussein respectively. Yet there is evidently significantly less reason to believe that either of these actors had any connection to 9/11 when compared with Saudi Arabia.

    In spite of this rather obvious reality, there were no calls in the aftermath of 9/11 to take any kind of action whatsoever against Saudi Arabia, let alone to invade it and replace its government. Yet despite much thinner evidence linking them to the attacks, the Bush administration instead launched invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. What could explain this stunning paradox?

    Revealing double standards

    The answer lies in examining the criteria on which the US bases its treatment of other countries. As The Canary has extensively argued, US administrations of both parties do not base their treatment of other countries on their publicly-stated criteria of human rights and democracy. (Indeed, if the true motivation behind Washington’s foreign policy was to spread democracy, as George W. Bush claimed, then Saudi Arabia would probably top the list of countries to invade given its status as one of the world’s last remaining absolute monarchies.) Rather, Washington bases its stance towards other nations according to how obedient they are to US geo-strategic and economic interests.

    When it comes to Saudi Arabia, the evidence speaks for itself. In the final year of World War II, the US entered into a deal with the Saudi royal family to ensure continued privileged access to the country’s ample oil reserves. Ever since, the Saudi royals have been rewarded for this with the most fawning treatment imaginable. As then-US president Donald Trump put it in a November 2018 statement:

    The United States intends to remain a steadfast partner of Saudi Arabia to ensure the interests of our country, Israel and all other partners in the region.

    Opening up the region to Western oil companies in Afghanistan…

    When it comes to Afghanistan and Iraq, on the other hand, the Taliban and the government of Saddam Hussein had fallen afoul of the US foreign policy establishment due to their growing unwillingness to serve US interests. This was particularly so in terms of providing favorable access to their countries’ oil reserves. And that resulted in a desperate scramble by the Bush administration to somehow tie them to 9/11.

    In the case of Afghanistan, Washington attempted to strike a deal with the Taliban in the late-1990s to allow the US-based petroleum giant Unocal to build an oil pipeline through the country to the Caspian Sea. When it became clear that the Taliban was unlikely to accommodate this process, Unocal withdrew from negotiations and the plans were shelved. When 9/11 came along, it gave the Bush administration its perfect ruse to topple the Taliban in order to install a more friendly government that would allow the building of the pipeline. (Though there were considerable delays, probably owing to the chaos caused by the US invasion, construction of the pipeline finally began in February 2018. The New York Times reported at the time: “The United States has supported pipelines to bypass Russia and alleviate former Soviet states’ economic dependence on it.”)

    Since this motivation would have surely provoked widespread scorn, Washington weaponized 9/11 by issuing allegations that the Taliban were ‘harboring terrorists’ and had links to al-Qaeda to whip up public and congressional support for invasion. On both counts, these allegations were dubious. A 2011 report by the Center on International Cooperation describes the relationship between al-Qaeda and the Taliban as “complicated and often tense”, adding that they “knew little about each other”. Nonetheless, the ploy seemingly paid off: only one congress member voted against the invasion while public opinion polls at the time put support for it at around 80%.

    …and Iraq

    A similar, and even more duplicitous, dynamic played out with respect to Iraq. Saddam Hussein had been a close US ally, and even received US military funding in the 1980s. But throughout the 1990s, the relationship began to sour over his invasion of Kuwait. In the early 2000s, Hussein’s status as a US enemy was cemented when he fully nationalised Iraq’s oil industry and closed off access to Western petroleum companies. Unfortunately for the Bush administration, however, his connection to 9/11 was simply nonexistent – even Bush himself said after the invasion “I don’t think we ever said — at least I know I didn’t say that there was a direct connection between September the 11th and Saddam Hussein”.

    So his administration concocted a narrative, which the media dutifully repeated, that would nonetheless play on public fears that had been ignited by the attacks. It fabricated bogus claims that Hussein’s government had been developing ‘weapons of mass destruction’ to provide a ruse for invading the country. (To demonstrate the absurdity of denouncing Iraq for purportedly having ‘weapons of mass’ destruction, consider that the only nuclear armed state in the entire region is the US’s number one ally, Israel.) As was the case with Afghanistan, the true purpose of the invasion was to create a more favorable environment for US oil companies. Even members of the US’s own military have admitted this reality. Former head of U.S. Central Command and Military Operations in Iraq gen. John Abizaid said in 2007: “Of course it’s about oil; we can’t really deny that”.

    Some of the Bush administration’s leading figures, meanwhile, had extensive ties to the very corporations that ultimately benefited from the invasion, such as the former CEO of oil giant Halliburton, Dick Cheney, who served as Bush’s vice president. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were highly profitable for such US private contractors, which received billions in contracts for both wars. Halliburton itself ultimately became the largest single US government contractor in Iraq and by 2013 had received over $39bn in contracts.

    The final piece of evidence could be coming soon

    Clearly, the US foreign policy and intelligence establishment have a vested interest in suppressing evidence of potential Saudi involvement in the 9/11 attacks. After all, this would make even further nonsense of the entire edifice of bogus justification that the Bush administration built in order to manufacture consent for invading Iraq and Afghanistan.

    Though his administration is hardly a decisive break from the bipartisan consensus for endless war, Biden’s decision to declassify the documents should nonetheless be welcomed. It might end up providing the final piece of evidence needed to determine whether one of the US’s own allies in the Middle East played a hand in the worst domestic terrorist atrocity in US history.

    Featured image via Flickr – Stacy Herbert and Wikimedia Commons – Michael Foran

    By Peter Bolton

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • The Rise of the Security-Industrial Complex from 9/11 to COVID-19

    I tell you, freedom and human rights in America are doomed. The U.S. government will lead the American people in — and the West in general — into an unbearable hell and a choking life.

    — Osama bin Laden (October 2001), as reported by CNN

    What a strange and harrowing road we’ve walked since September 11, 2001, littered with the debris of our once-vaunted liberties. We have gone from a nation that took great pride in being a model of a representative democracy to being a model of how to persuade a freedom-loving people to march in lockstep with a police state.

    Our losses are mounting with every passing day.

    What began with the post-9/11 passage of the USA Patriot Act  has snowballed into the eradication of every vital safeguard against government overreach, corruption and abuse.

    The citizenry’s unquestioning acquiescence to anything the government wants to do in exchange for the phantom promise of safety and security has resulted in a society where the nation has been locked down into a militarized, mechanized, hypersensitive, legalistic, self-righteous, goose-stepping antithesis of every principle upon which this nation was founded.

    Set against a backdrop of government surveillance, militarized police, SWAT team raids, asset forfeiture, eminent domain, overcriminalization, armed surveillance drones, whole body scanners, stop and frisk searches, police violence and the like—all of which have been sanctioned by Congress, the White House and the courts—our constitutional freedoms have been steadily chipped away at, undermined, eroded, whittled down, and generally discarded.

    The rights embodied in the Constitution, if not already eviscerated, are on life support.

    Free speech, the right to protest, the right to challenge government wrongdoing, due process, a presumption of innocence, the right to self-defense, accountability and transparency in government, privacy, press, sovereignty, assembly, bodily integrity, representative government: all of these and more have become casualties in the government’s war on the American people, a war that has grown more pronounced since 9/11.

    Indeed, since the towers fell on 9/11, the U.S. government has posed a greater threat to our freedoms than any terrorist, extremist or foreign entity ever could.

    While nearly 3,000 people died in the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. government and its agents have easily killed at least ten times that number of civilians in the U.S. and abroad since 9/11 through its police shootings, SWAT team raids, drone strikes and profit-driven efforts to police the globe, sell weapons to foreign nations (which too often fall into the hands of terrorists), and foment civil unrest in order to keep the security industrial complex gainfully employed.

    The American people have been treated like enemy combatants, to be spied on, tracked, scanned, frisked, searched, subjected to all manner of intrusions, intimidated, invaded, raided, manhandled, censored, silenced, shot at, locked up, denied due process, and killed.

    In allowing ourselves to be distracted by terror drills, foreign wars, color-coded warnings, pandemic lockdowns and other carefully constructed exercises in propaganda, sleight of hand, and obfuscation, we failed to recognize that the U.S. government—the government that was supposed to be a “government of the people, by the people, for the people”—has become the enemy of the people.

    Consider that the government’s answer to every problem has been more government—at taxpayer expense—and less individual liberty.

    Every crisis—manufactured or otherwise—since the nation’s early beginnings has become a make-work opportunity for the government to expand its reach and its power at taxpayer expense while limiting our freedoms at every turn: The Great Depression. The World Wars. The 9/11 terror attacks. The COVID-19 pandemic.

    Viewed in this light, the history of the United States is a testament to the old adage that liberty decreases as government (and government bureaucracy) grows. Or, to put it another way, as government expands, liberty contracts.

    This is how the emergency state operates, after all, and we should know: after all, we have spent the past 20 years in a state of emergency.

    From 9/11 to COVID-19, “we the people” have acted the part of the helpless, gullible victims desperately in need of the government to save us from whatever danger threatens. In turn, the government has been all too accommodating and eager while also expanding its power and authority in the so-called name of national security.

    This is a government that has grown so corrupt, greedy, power-hungry and tyrannical over the course of the past 240-plus years that our constitutional republic has since given way to idiocracy, and representative government has given way to a kleptocracy (a government ruled by thieves) and a kakistocracy (a government run by unprincipled career politicians, corporations and thieves that panders to the worst vices in our nature and has little regard for the rights of American citizens).

    What this really amounts to is a war on the American people, fought on American soil, funded with taxpayer dollars, and waged with a single-minded determination to use national crises, manufactured or otherwise, in order to transform the American homeland into a battlefield.

    Indeed, the government’s (mis)management of various states of emergency in the past 20 years has spawned a massive security-industrial complex the likes of which have never been seen before. According to the National Priorities Project at the progressive Institute for Policy Studies, since 9/11, the United States has spent $21 trillion on “militarization, surveillance, and repression.”

    Clearly, this is not a government that is a friend to freedom.

    Rather, this is a government that, in conjunction with its corporate partners, views the citizenry as consumers and bits of data to be bought, sold and traded.

    This is a government that spies on and treats its people as if they have no right to privacy, especially in their own homes while the freedom to be human is being erased.

    This is a government that is laying the groundwork to weaponize the public’s biomedical data as a convenient means by which to penalize certain “unacceptable” social behaviors. Incredibly, a new government agency HARPA (a healthcare counterpart to the Pentagon’s research and development arm DARPA) will take the lead in identifying and targeting “signs” of mental illness or violent inclinations among the populace by using artificial intelligence to collect data from Apple Watches, Fitbits, Amazon Echo and Google Home.

    This is a government that routinely engages in taxation without representation, whose elected officials lobby for our votes only to ignore us once elected.

    This is a government comprised of petty bureaucrats, vigilantes masquerading as cops, and faceless technicians.

    This is a government that railroads taxpayers into financing government programs whose only purpose is to increase the power and wealth of the corporate elite.

    This is a government—a warring empire—that forces its taxpayers to pay for wars abroad that serve no other purpose except to expand the reach of the military industrial complex.

    This is a government that subjects its people to scans, searches, pat downs and other indignities by the TSA and VIPR raids on so-called “soft” targets like shopping malls and bus depots by black-clad, Darth Vader look-alikes.

    This is a government that uses fusion centers, which represent the combined surveillance efforts of federal, state and local law enforcement, to track the citizenry’s movements, record their conversations, and catalogue their transactions.

    This is a government whose wall-to-wall surveillance has given rise to a suspect society in which the burden of proof has been reversed such that Americans are now assumed guilty until or unless they can prove their innocence.

    This is a government that treats its people like second-class citizens who have no rights, and is working overtime to stigmatize and dehumanize any and all who do not fit with the government’s plans for this country.

    This is a government that uses free speech zones, roving bubble zones and trespass laws to silence, censor and marginalize Americans and restrict their First Amendment right to speak truth to power.

    This is a government that persists in renewing the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which allows the president and the military to arrest and detain American citizens indefinitely based on the say-so of the government.

    This is a government that saddled us with the Patriot Act, which opened the door to all manner of government abuses and intrusions on our privacy.

    This is a government that, in direct opposition to the dire warnings of those who founded our country, has allowed the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to establish a standing army by way of programs that transfer surplus military hardware to local and state police.

    This is a government that has militarized American’s domestic police, equipping them with military weapons such as “tens of thousands of machine guns; nearly 200,000 ammunition magazines; a million hollow-point bullets; thousands of pieces of camouflage and night-vision equipment; and hundreds of silencers, armored cars and aircraft,” in addition to armored vehicles, sound cannons and the like.

    This is a government that has provided cover to police when they shoot and kill unarmed individuals just for standing a certain way, or moving a certain way, or holding something—anything—that police could misinterpret to be a gun, or igniting some trigger-centric fear in a police officer’s mind that has nothing to do with an actual threat to their safety.

    This is a government that has created a Constitution-free zone within 100 miles inland of the border around the United States, paving the way for Border Patrol agents to search people’s homes, intimately probe their bodies, and rifle through their belongings, all without a warrant. Nearly 66% of Americans (2/3 of the U.S. population, 197.4 million people) now live within that 100-mile-deep, Constitution-free zone.

    This is a government that treats public school students as if they were prison inmates, enforcing zero tolerance policies that criminalize childish behavior, and indoctrinating them with teaching that emphasizes rote memorization and test-taking over learning, synthesizing and critical thinking.

    This is a government that is operating in the negative on every front: it’s spending far more than what it makes (and takes from the American taxpayers) and it is borrowing heavily (from foreign governments and Social Security) to keep the government operating and keep funding its endless wars abroad. Meanwhile, the nation’s sorely neglected infrastructure—railroads, water pipelines, ports, dams, bridges, airports and roads—is rapidly deteriorating.

    This is a government that has empowered police departments to make a profit at the expense of those they have sworn to protect through the use of asset forfeiture laws, speed traps, and red light cameras.

    This is a government whose gun violence—inflicted on unarmed individuals by battlefield-trained SWAT teams, militarized police, and bureaucratic government agents trained to shoot first and ask questions later—poses a greater threat to the safety and security of the nation than any mass shooter. There are now reportedly more bureaucratic (non-military) government agents armed with high-tech, deadly weapons than U.S. Marines.

    This is a government that has allowed the presidency to become a dictatorship operating above and beyond the law, regardless of which party is in power.

    This is a government that treats dissidents, whistleblowers and freedom fighters as enemies of the state.

    This is a government that has in recent decades unleashed untold horrors upon the world—including its own citizenry—in the name of global conquest, the acquisition of greater wealth, scientific experimentation, and technological advances, all packaged in the guise of the greater good.

    This is a government that allows its agents to break laws with immunity while average Americans get the book thrown at them.

    This is a government that speaks in a language of force. What is this language of force? Militarized police. Riot squads. Camouflage gear. Black uniforms. Armored vehicles. Mass arrests. Pepper spray. Tear gas. Batons. Strip searches. Surveillance cameras. Kevlar vests. Drones. Lethal weapons. Less-than-lethal weapons unleashed with deadly force. Rubber bullets. Water cannons. Stun grenades. Arrests of journalists. Crowd control tactics. Intimidation tactics. Brutality. Contempt of cop charges.

    This is a government that justifies all manner of government tyranny and power grabs in the so-called name of national security, national crises and national emergencies.

    This is a government that exports violence worldwide, with one of this country’s most profitable exports being weapons. Indeed, the United States, the world’s largest exporter of arms, has been selling violence to the world in order to prop up the military industrial complex and maintain its endless wars abroad.

    This is a government that is consumed with squeezing every last penny out of the population and seemingly unconcerned if essential freedoms are trampled in the process.

    This is a government that routinely undermines the Constitution and rides roughshod over the rights of the citizenry, eviscerating individual freedoms so that its own powers can be expanded.

    This is a government that believes it has the authority to search, seize, strip, scan, spy on, probe, pat down, taser, and arrest any individual at any time and for the slightest provocation, the Constitution be damned.

    In other words, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, this is not a government that believes in, let alone upholds, freedom.

     

    The post The Rise of the Security-Industrial Complex from 9/11 to COVID-19 first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Post 9/11: where did ‘human rights’ go?

    LUNCH BRIEFING 9/11 Twenty Years On
    Tuesday 28 September, 12:30-13:30
    Auditorium A1A, Maison de la paix, Geneva, and online

    Two full decades have elapsed since the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C. In the aftermath of these events, the world has entered a period characterised by a number of dynamics, which have persisted and shaped significantly the configuration of the global order. What is the nature of these transformations, notably the militarisation of international relations, the securitisation of social affairs, the rise of cultural and religious tensions and the crisis of democracy? Has the post-COVID-19 moment in turn ushered the end of the post-11 September world? Ultimately, what historical meaning can we ascribe to legacy of ‘9/11’?

    Mohammad-Mahmoud Ould Mohamedou is Professor of International History and Politics, and Chair of the Department of International History and Politics at the Graduate Institute. Previously the Associate Director of the Programme on Humanitarian Policy and Conflict Research at Harvard University, he is the author of a trilogy on the post-11 September era and recipient of the 2021 International Studies Association (ISA) Global South Distinguished Scholar Award.

    The Lunch Briefing will be moderated by Julie Billaud, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Sociology.

    On cue Imogen Foulkes wrote on 7 September 2021 a post for Swissinfo “When the world became a ‘human rights free zone’ September 11, 2001″.

    No one will forget the shock of that day. It’s hard even now, two decades later, to describe how it felt to watch something so unimaginable, so horrific. When I returned to my newsroom that evening, a colleague said to me “well, Imogen, that’s it, our world has changed forever”. I was still so focused on the immediate event that I didn’t quite understand him, and it took me a while to realise how right he was.

    Our world did change forever that day; from smaller inconveniences around how we travel, to fears over how safe we are, to prejudices and intolerance towards groups perceived as a threat, to sweeping changes in security laws.

    In the latest episode of our Inside Geneva podcast, we look at those changes, and the consequences, in particular for human rights. Gerald Staberock, secretary general of the World Organisation Against Torture, tells me: “I want my government to fight terrorism. I want those who did 9/11 or whatever terrorist attacks to be brought to justice.” But he also regrets the fact that the 9/11 attacks, which he describes as “a denial of the very values of human rights”, led to – in his view – “another attack on human rights, through counterterrorism”. 

    Looking back now, with all the knowledge we have of extraordinary rendition, Guantanamo Bay, waterboarding and so on, it is quite hard to remember that in the first months and even years after 9/11, none of us, not even human rights defenders, were quite aware of how the “war on terror” was being fought.

    Once that war was being conducted in earnest in Afghanistan, I remember getting a hint, off the record, from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), who told me that they were aware of detainees being transferred from Bagram airbase, but had no idea where they were being taken. It is the ICRC’s role, under the Geneva Conventions, to visit those detained during conflict, a role which was, for a while at least, impossible to fulfil.

    Fionnuala ní Aoláin, currently UN special rapporteur on human rights and counterterrorism, also joins us on the podcast. Her position, she points out, was not created until five years after 9/11, and, she says “in that absence lies the story of a human rights free zone”, during which “the United States moved to engage in practices of torture, of rendition, or the establishment of a black hole where people were held arbitrarily”. 

    Governments have argued that extraordinary measures are necessary to counter extraordinary threats. Certainly no political leader wants a 9/11 type attack on his or her watch. And, many opinion polls show, the public are prepared to compromise some fundamental human rights standards in the name of defeating terrorism.

    A 2016 study by the ICRC found that, among millennials in industrialised countries, many agreed that torture was justified if it led to information that could save lives. Strikingly, among young people living in conflict zones, or under repressive regimes, a large majority remained opposed to torture.

    This shift in opinion is a concern for ní Aoláin, who points out that some governments have taken to justifying increasingly repressive laws in the name of the war on terror. “Right now, in…Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt, we see governments saying that human rights defenders are terrorists, that eco warriors are terrorists, that women’s rights defenders are terrorists.”

    Interestingly, ní Aoláin comes from Belfast. She grew up with terror attacks, and counterterrorism measures. She believes that “actually it is counterproductive to security to violate human rights”, a point of view Staberock agrees with. He remembers research done in Northern Ireland in which senior security officers admitted that preventive detention had been a disaster, not just from a human rights perspective, but from a security perspective because “it made the cause much broader, it made the problem much bigger…by victimising people, you weaken the cause”.

    Both ní Aoláin and Staberock believe the term “terrorist” is too widely used, and that it can become a convenient slogan for governments to introduce all sorts of legislation which would otherwise not easily be justifiable.

    Staberock argues that “the best answer to terrorism is to demask it as killings. Not allow it to hide behind ideology. Demask it in an ordinary criminal process, bring people to justice, punish them, stick to your rules”.

    The first shots in the war on terror were fired, 20 years ago, in Afghanistan. Today, in that same country, we are watching a humanitarian and foreign policy disaster unfold. As western diplomats made a panicked dash for the airport, they left millions of Afghans to live, again, under the Taliban, the very “terrorist” group the US and its allies entered Afghanistan to defeat.

    So have we learned anything from the last 20 years? Do listen to Inside Geneva to find out more, but I’ll leave you with these final thoughts from ní Aoláin.

    “We appear not to have learnt any lessons,” she says. “What we appear to be doing is betraying civil society, leaving women, human rights defenders and girls…when we conveniently decide that we’ve had enough and it’s time for us to leave.”

    But, as a human rights defender herself, she is not deterred: “If you fight for human rights you’re always pushing big rocks up mountains, and you watch them fall down, and you push the same rocks up the mountain again. I think those of who work on human rights in the context of counterterrorism are looking at an enormous big rock.”

    http://view.com.graduateinstitute.ch/?qs=03593ae72d465f424c62524fcb3b0674a1400adcb8708ad99947e5c2a73185ef84f12eb7b35f47251d236364d73d73396f7f3d03e7c28892b24b62800c3fbf2a0ccfc7e543a7d5d02fcd6e2c5427714a082f2ab63c8151e4

    https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/response-to-9-11—counterterrorism-attack-on-human-rights/46906238

    This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.

  • The US Owes Reparations to Afghan Women, Starting With an Open Borders Policy

    Women in Hijab sit at the back of a classroom

    My family escaped Afghanistan and resettled in the U.S. in the early 1990s, when I was a child. Even as I grew accustomed to life in the United States, I mourned the separation from my beautiful home country. Hardly a decade had passed before my new home country waged war on Afghanistan in the aftermath of 9/11.

    From the very beginning of the war on Afghanistan Afghan women have been selectively and opportunistically used as pawns to justify military intervention and nation building. For example, less than two months after the launch of the war, First Lady Laura Bush gave a speech saying, “The fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women.” Fast-forward 20 years, and former president George W. Bush, who launched the war on Afghanistan, expressed concern for Afghan women in response to the news that Biden was withdrawing troops, saying “I’m afraid Afghan women and girls are going to suffer unspeakable harm.” However, U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan was never actually about protecting Afghans. That the Bush administration used an illegal war to feign concern for Afghan women was yet another level of violence that that the U.S. government inflicted on Afghanistan and its people.

    In my visits to Afghanistan in 2011, 2012 and 2013, I witnessed the violence of the U.S. military occupation firsthand. The capital city of Kabul felt like an open-air prison with U.S. military and NATO forces surrounding and blockading the city. U.S. soldiers and vehicles had priority over everyone and everything; Afghans had to stand back and give them right of way. I never felt safe during these visits, and it wasn’t the norm for any Afghan, regardless of gender identity, to speak of feeling safe. There were a handful of suicide attacks while I was there. One day I was shopping in a well-known and heavily populated market; 24 hours later, that exact market was attacked by a suicide bomber and suffered high casualties. The fact that I was in that exact location just 24 hours ago really impacted me for the remainder of my trip, and it still haunts me to this day. That was life in Afghanistan under the U.S. occupation.

    I spent most of my time in Kabul, supposedly the safest city in all of Afghanistan. But when I traveled outside Kabul, it was another world, free of occupation and violence; the mountains, rivers, and rural landscape were so breathtakingly beautiful and calming. That’s the Afghanistan I like to remember. The military occupation did nothing for my country or my people, especially women. Now the country has completely fallen to the mercy of the misogynistic and brutal Taliban, and as an Afghan in the diaspora, I honestly wonder if I will ever be able to set foot on Afghan soil again.

    While I never believed the U.S. to be the savior of Afghan women, the U.S. failure to prevent the Taliban from once again assuming power shows that the stated mission articulated by the U.S. in the early days of the war has not been “accomplished” in the last two decades, especially in relation to women. Instead, women have been harmed by the Taliban and the U.S. alike. The fear, anxiety and despair that has gripped Afghans both in Afghanistan and in the diaspora is impossible to express in words. The Afghan people are urgently in need of the protection and support of the international community. The rapid advancement of the Taliban has proven how precarious the current situation is. The most extreme members of the Taliban are ruthless fanatics vowing once again to subjugate Afghan women to extreme human rights abuses. Their dominance threatens to yield systematic persecution against individuals based on gender, ethnic background and religious beliefs. This past week, the U.S. abandoned Afghan women abruptly and without sufficient aid or support for evacuation, proving that they never cared about women’s rights and security in Afghanistan. In the last few weeks, numerous Afghan women have gone into hiding in Kabul. Women’s rights activists, journalists, young students and women NGO workers are all fearing backlash from the Taliban. My heart has always bled for my Afghan sisters, and even more so now. And as an Afghan American woman, I feel it is my responsibility to be a voice for women in Afghanistan and hold the international community accountable for their safety and security.

    The perpetual narrative that the U.S. has always put forth is that it is saving Afghans from themselves. But we don’t need to be saved by the U.S. — we are the ones who will determine our future. As young Afghan American influencers are making noise and spreading awareness on TikTok, Instagram and Facebook, this new generation, born and raised in the U.S., express their American roots but have not forgotten their ancestral roots either. Their voices matter and I beg my fellow Americans to listen to them first and foremost. The U.S. has demonstrated a lack of care for the Afghan people time and time again, both by waging war on Afghanistan in the first place and in the way paternalistic government and media narratives have drowned out the voices of actual Afghan and Afghan American women.

    In 2001, Donald Rumsfeld, who was an architect of the war in Afghanistan, stated, “We did not start the war… So let there be not doubt, responsibility for every single casualty in this war, be they innocent Afghans or innocent Americans, rests at the feet of Taliban and Al Qaeda.” From the beginning therefore, the U.S. has always deflected responsibility and accountability for the war in Afghanistan. This has resulted in callous disregard for the destruction the United States has caused in Afghanistan and the harm and pain it has caused Afghan women.

    The U.S. is responsible for the state violence it has inflicted on Afghanistan, and it is imperative for accountability to be included in the discourse surrounding the war. One aspect of accountability is clear: The U.S. must implement an “open borders” policy pertaining to incoming Afghan refugees. This means that the U.S. in addition to the international community must open their borders to Afghan women and other vulnerable groups in Afghanistan that are fleeing the country. This is critical as many are fleeing from the violence in Afghanistan that the U.S. caused over the course of 20 years of perpetual warfare and destruction that only legitimized and paved the way for the return of the Taliban. Providing assistance to Afghan refugees, especially Afghan women, is not an act of benevolence by the U.S.; rather, it is what is owed.

    On September 1, the Costs of War Project out of Brown University released its findings on the number of deaths in the post-9/11 wars. Their findings indicate that, in the almost 20 years of the War on Afghanistan, over 46,000 Afghan civilians were killed. This is almost certainly a conservative estimate and the real cost of lives lost is likely much, much higher, particularly when one includes deaths driven by displacement, starvation and other consequences of war. Despite this human cost, the United States has made no effort to acknowledge these deaths in any serious way. This violence must be reckoned with, and that reckoning must include compensation to the families of deceased loved ones and a serious mechanism of accountability for those who caused the war in the first place — namely Bush and his administration officials.

    We need accountability from the U.S., for the violence that it has both perpetrated and facilitated and for the everlasting facade of caring about and protecting Afghan women. If U.S. leaders really care about Afghan women, it’s time to implement an open borders policy for refugees. This is the only way forward.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Bush’s EPA Hid Health Risks From Toxic Dust at Ground Zero and Thousands Died

    As this week marks the 20th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, we look at an enraging new documentary, 9/11’s Unsettled Dust, on the impact of the toxic, cancer-causing smoke and dust that hung over ground zero and how the Environmental Protection Agency put Wall Street’s interests before public health and told people the air was safe to breathe. One of the key figures in the film is Democracy Now! co-host Juan González, who was among the first to expose the public health and environmental crisis at ground zero in a series of reports for the New York Daily News. He says the intense backlash from the mayor’s office and federal officials “cowed” the newspaper, but he has no regrets. “My only mistake was believing that it would take 20 years for people to get sick,” González says. “It took about five years for the deaths and the severe illnesses to really become apparent.” Director Lisa Katzman says she made the film because she was a resident of Lower Manhattan who saw the attack and its aftermath up close and wanted “to address the lack of accountability” from city and federal officials. “The same people that were always touting ‘Never forget! Never forget!’ and constantly reminding us of the heroism of these responders were unwilling to do anything to actually help them,” notes Katzman.

    TRANSCRIPT

    This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

    AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to start with a warning to our listeners and viewers: Today’s show includes graphic images and descriptions, some that you may certainly have heard and seen before.

    Yes, this week marks the 20th anniversary of the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center towers in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., that killed nearly 3,000 people. We’ll never know exactly how many people, because those who go uncounted in life go uncounted in death, perhaps the undocumented workers around the area.

    But we begin our coverage looking at the impact of the toxic, cancer-causing smoke and dust that hung over ground zero in Manhattan as the fire burned for 100 more days. At the time, the Environmental Protection Agency told people who worked at the site and lived and went to school near it that the air was safe to breathe. In the years that followed, more than 13,200 first responders and survivors have been diagnosed with a variety of cancers and chronic respiratory and gastrointestinal illnesses. At least — well, close to 1,900 first responders, survivors and workers who recovered bodies and cleaned up the wreckage have since died from illnesses, many of them linked to their time at ground zero.

    For the whole hour, we’re looking at an enraging new documentary that exposes the massive environmental and public health crisis caused by the 9/11 attack and how politicians and the EPA head, Christine Todd Whitman, the former governor of New Jersey, put Wall Street’s interests before public health in the aftermath. It also shows how 9/11 responders and survivors had to fight for healthcare justice while they were sick and dying, going to Washington scores of times, in wheelchairs, on crutches, with oxygen. Yes, tons of toxic dust fell on New York City 9/11. While concentrated in the 16-acre disaster site, wind carried the chemical contaminants throughout the city, in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens. This is the trailer for the new documentary, 9/11’s Unsettled Dust.

    ONLOOKER 1: Yeah, it seemed like it just sort of —

    ONLOOKER 2: Oh my god! Oh my god!

    DISPATCHER: Yo, the North Tower is coming down. All units, be advised that the North Tower is coming down.

    JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Once we saw the actual initial reports, we started realizing there was benzene. There was lead in the air. I was already getting warnings that there were many more potential toxic exposures.

    UNIDENTIFIED: When we heard Christine Todd Whitman get on TV and say the air quality is safe, we were horrified.

    CHRISTINE TODD WHITMAN: The concentrations are such that they don’t pose a health hazard. We’re going to make sure everybody is safe.

    JOHN FEAL: You know, not only did we inhale and breathe in the air, we were drinking it and eating it. And I bitched and moaned to anybody who would listen to me.

    REP. CAROLYN MALONEY: My husband and I and other people who were engineers went down to the site. And there was no question that it was an unhealthy site.

    UNIDENTIFIED: They didn’t have a mask in the beginning, because some people were using Home Depot masks, even the guys at ground zero.

    JOHN McNAMARA: On 9/11, responded, the World Trade Center, breathing in all the toxic air, and they said it was safe to breathe.

    JOHN FEAL: We’re talking about human life. We’re talking about men that couldn’t be here, that had traveled with me, the 80 trips that I made to D.C., that are laying in ICU or at home with IVs in them.

    JON STEWART: The first responders were told the Zadroga Act would be included — they were told this last week — it would be included in the transportation bill passed last week.

    SEN. KIRSTEN GILLIBRAND: Not one of the first responders standing with me here today should have to be here today. Not one of them should have to take another trip to Washington.

    JOHN FEAL: This is about Washington, D.C., helping out people from 431 congressional districts that went to ground zero. New York wasn’t attacked; this country was attacked.

    AMY GOODMAN: That’s the trailer for the new documentary, 9/11’s Unsettled Dust, which premieres later this week on PBS stations in New York, New Jersey and Long Island.

    For more, we’re joined by Lisa Katzman, the film’s director and producer. One of the key figures in the film is Democracy Now!’s Juan González, who is not only co-host today, but his critical work at the beginning of the time after 9/11 just changed the landscape of how people understood what was happening near and around the pile. He and Joel Kupferman of the Environmental Law & Justice Project were among the first to expose the public health and environmental crisis at ground zero in a series of reports for the New York Daily News. Juan González is also the author of the 2002 book, Fallout: The Environmental Consequences of the World Trade Center Collapse.

    So, Juan, we’re beginning with you. I mean, that New York Daily News cover that caused so much outrage and response and attack on you, it was in October. It said “exclusive.” And we’re going to show it right here. “Toxic Zone” was the headline, “Levels of benzene, dioxin, PCBs and other dangerous chemicals at Ground Zero exceed federal standards.” That may not surprise people now, Juan, but you’re the one who had it on the cover at a time when the EPA head was telling the country all was well in Lower Manhattan in terms of safety for people returning to work. Talk about how you came to understand how toxic ground zero was.

    JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Amy, I actually had started — I did an article about less than three weeks after the attack on the World Trade Center, on September 28th, which began to talk about the high levels of asbestos that Joel Kupferman had discovered in his own independent testing that he had done around ground zero, even as far down as Battery Park, and very high levels of asbestos and of fiberglass, which ended up being actually responsible for much of the scarring of lungs that many of the first responders and other people downtown had. And so, I had actually done two articles before, before that big front-page story. But then, of course, as Joel was able to get even more public records requests on health testing that had been hidden from the public, that big October 26 article, as I recall, was the one that laid out those findings.

    And the response was unbelievable, the backlash against it from the mayor’s office, from the EPA to the Daily News, to the point that, actually, my editors pulled back. They began, after that, beginning to hold my columns. And at one point, I actually had to go to the editor-in-chief at the time, a guy by the name of Ed Kosner, and I said, “Ed, why are you holding up my follow-ups on this?” And he says, “Well, you know, City Hall says this, and EPA says you’re overstating the problem, you’re sensationalizing. And The New York Times is not following our stories, and none of the other press are agreeing with us.” And I said to him, “Well, since when do we depend on other media to tell us how to report what we find?” So, it became clear that the paper had been cowed by the federal and the city government.

    So I said to Kosner at the time — I said, “Ed, you don’t really know me. You just got here about a year ago. And I don’t know you. So this is what I’m going to do. You run the paper. You’re in charge of the paper. And I’m in charge of my column. So, I’m going to keep writing about this issue, because I don’t want it on my conscience that 20 years later people are going to start getting sick and dying because we didn’t warn them of the potential health effects here. And so, I’m not going to stop writing about this.” And the paper did end up killing some of my columns, but they ran most of them at the back of the page — at the back of the paper.

    My only mistake was believing that it would take 20 years for people to get sick. It actually took far less, took about five years for the deaths and the severe illnesses to really become apparent. And by then, the paper had a new management, a new editor. And then the paper embarked — the editorial board embarked on a campaign to reveal the deaths and the illnesses that were occurring. And eventually it won the Pulitzer Prize. The Daily News won the Pulitzer Prize, the editorial board, for its coverage of the health effects, the very health effects that five years earlier it had tried to squash. You know, so, history has a strange way of evolving on issues like this. And I think that it’s a lesson that most media are very good at exposing problems far away. The closer the problems get to home, the more difficult it becomes to expose them.

    AMY GOODMAN: You should have won the Pulitzer Prize for your series of prophetic reports. I wanted to go to David Newman with NYCOSH. That’s the New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health. He’s speaking in the documentary, 9/11’s Unsettled Dust.

    DAVID NEWMAN: There was substantial data available prior to the event that would indicate issues of concern with the collapse of the Twin Towers. One of those was the widely known and widely documented and widely advertised heavy use of asbestos during the construction of the World Trade Center project. So, the figure that is in widespread circulation and uncontested is that there were 400 tons of asbestos used in sprayed-on fireproofing material in the Trade Center construction. That figure excludes probable additional asbestos used in pipe insulation and other applications. So there’s a huge amount. I think it’s safe to say that whatever was in the World Trade Center was released into the general environment. Nothing disappeared.

    AMY GOODMAN: “Nothing disappeared.” Whatever was inside the World Trade Towers became what we breathed. That’s David Newman with the New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health. And, Juan, you talked about the New York Daily News winning the Pulitzer, but you didn’t, and you should have. You were the one who led the way in exposing this.

    I wanted to bring in the director, Lisa Katzman, director and producer of this utterly devastating documentary, 9/11’s Unsettled Deaths [sic], 9/11’s Unsettled Dust. It could be “unsettled deaths.” And we’re going to be talking about that in a minute.

    But talk about why you chose to make this film, and the significance of a crusading reporter, like Juan González, and others who were putting out this information going against the financial establishment. Let’s remember who the “country’s mayor” was at the time: Rudy Giuliani. The Environmental Protection Agency administrator, who now says, OK, maybe she made a mistake — she dreads the 9/11 anniversary because of this — Christine Todd Whitman, saying, “Everyone, back to work.”

    LISA KATZMAN: Well, it’s an honor to be on the show. And hello to both of you. Hi, Juan. It was good to hear you report on those first stories that you did, again.

    Yes, the reason that I was drawn to make the film is I’m a member of — I live downtown. I live four blocks from the World Trade Centers, and then what became ground zero. And I witnessed the recovery, the rescue and recovery effort, through looking through my living room windows at it over a number of months. And it was very evident — fortunately, at the time, I had a teaching job upstate, so I was not in my apartment on a full-time basis. But to anybody that lived here, who spent any time here or near downtown Manhattan, it defied one’s senses and common sense to imagine that this wasn’t a horrendously, I mean, off-the-charts environmental disaster. And so, the statement that the air is safe, the denials that were made were utterly absurd. I mean, the level of disconnect from reality is almost legendary, I would say at this point. It’s really hard to fathom that those things were said.

    And the reason that I felt that I needed to make the film was to address that and to address the lack of accountability at the time. And then, what ensued, you know, in the years afterward, is that that lack of accountability traveled through the courts. It traveled through the way that Republicans in Congress thought about what should be done to help first responders. And the same people that were always touting “Never forget! Never forget!” and constantly reminding us of the heroism of these responders were unwilling to do anything to actually help them. And so, the hypocrisy of that, the rage that I felt over that as time went on, led me to want to make this film, which I began doing in 2010, when the first responders were making very — they had been making trips to D.C. to pass the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act for some time, but there was an intensification of those efforts in 2010, and that’s when I began filming.

    AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go to another part of the film. I mean, every three minutes, your jaw drops. This is the EPA’s Hugh Kaufman and Kimberly Flynn, founder of 9/11 Environmental Action, speaking about the EPA’s failure to warn people of the dangerous conditions at ground zero, and perhaps why.

    HUGH KAUFMAN: People told us, “I’m not allowed to wear a respirator, because there are cameras around, and they don’t the optics of me wearing a respirator down here cleaning up.”

    KIMBERLY FLYNN: Everyone came. Everyone who was affected came. There were responders. There were area workers. There were many, many residents and tenants’ association leaders. And there were scientists also who were bringing their information.

    HUGH KAUFMAN: Christine Todd Whitman, the head of EPA, who was telling the people the air is safe to breathe, owned a quarter of a million dollars in stock from Citigroup, and her husband worked for Citigroup. Travelers insurance company had insurance policies such that if the air wasn’t safe to breathe, it could cost Travelers insurance half a billion, a billion dollars in claims. Well, guess who owns Travelers insurance: Citigroup. And that’s how the insurance companies saved billions of dollars by Christine Todd Whitman’s lie.

    AMY GOODMAN: Juan, talk about the significance of this, the personal financial connections, what this meant for so many people, and continues to mean for the sick and the dying today.

    JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Amy, I think people should remember that Christine Todd Whitman did not act alone. She basically was acting under orders. And it was later revealed, I think by the treasury secretary under the Bush administration, that George Bush had — the president at the time had directly ordered that Wall Street be reopened within a week of the attacks, because there was a fear in the administration that the continued closing of the financial markets was going to have a disastrous effect on world capitalism.

    So, basically, once Bush ordered that Wall Street be reopened — and that meant thousands and thousands of financial industry workers had to come back to downtown Manhattan — then the health officials, including Christine Todd Whitman, had to justify, had to justify the orders. And rather than do the science first and then figure out what the policy, the policy was established, and the science was made to fit the facts.

    It was later revealed by the EPA’s inspector general report that the White House — the head of the environmental policy at the White House, a guy by the name James Connaughton, had actually rewritten the press releases that the EPA was putting out, to downplay the health impacts. So this was a direct order from the White House to get Wall Street back up and running, and the rest of the population of Lower Manhattan basically, in essence, were collateral damage to that policy.

    AMY GOODMAN: This is President George W. Bush’s EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman testifying at a 2007 congressional hearing on whether the federal government’s actions at the 9/11 attack sites, at the pile, violated the rights of first responders and local residents.

    CHRISTINE TODD WHITMAN: I got a call from the White House a day after, from the Office of the Economic Adviser, which is not surprising — they’re concerned about the economy of the country — saying — reminding me of the importance of Wall Street, of opening the stock market. I indicated that until that building was cleaned, until it was safe, it would be inappropriate. And that’s the last I heard of that. It was cleaned. It was safe, as you have heard from Mr. Henshaw, for them to go back in. And they were allowed back in. Was it wrong to try to get the city back on its feet as quickly as possible, in the safest way possible? Absolutely not. Safety was first and foremost, but we weren’t going to let the terrorists win.

    AMY GOODMAN: “We weren’t going to let the terrorists win.” During the hearing, Whitman was questioned by Florida Democratic Congressmember Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

    REP. DEBBIE WASSERMAN SCHULTZ: The EPA does have the — did have the ability to take over the site at the point that they felt that — and that is under Presidential Decision Directive 62, Emergency Support Function 10, and the National Contingency Plan under CERCLA. The EPA could have taken over control of the site from the city as the lead agency, if they felt that the city was not properly protecting their workers. So they certainly had the ability to do it, and you chose not to. So, if you are saying that the law wasn’t structured in New York to allow you to do that, then why didn’t EPA step in and take over?

    CHRISTINE TODD WHITMAN: Congresswoman, under — as you know, EPA would have, under certain circumstances, had the authority to take over the site. What had to be proven in order to invoke the CERCLA, or the Superfund Act, substantive, substantial and imminent danger. And the readings that we were getting, relative — and this was relative to the overall air; I’m talking more about outside of the pile — were not indicating that. And we were working in a collegial fashion with the city of New York. Again, as far as the workers on the pile, what our — we were tasked by OSHA to do the — I mean, excuse me, by FEMA to do the health and safety monitoring, to monitor the air. And we did that, and then we provided as many respirators —

    REP. DEBBIE WASSERMAN SCHULTZ: But, you know, when it comes to —

    CHRISTINE TODD WHITMAN: We were not tasked with —

    REP. DEBBIE WASSERMAN SCHULTZ: — to imminent — substantial and imminent danger, are you talking about immediate death, horrible sickness within weeks? Because mesothelioma, the cancer that is —

    CHRISTINE TODD WHITMAN: Right.

    REP. DEBBIE WASSERMAN SCHULTZ: — that is the result of exposure to asbestos, does not manifest itself substantially or immediately. It could be years. But it’s almost certain. So, how is it that you didn’t step in and exercise your authority, given that knowledge, which has been known for years?

    REP. JERROLD NADLER: The gentleman — the gentlelady’s time is expired. The witness may answer the question.

    CHRISTINE TODD WHITMAN: Congresswoman, that was based on what the interpretation of what our legal ability was to act by — in consultation with counsel at the time.

    AMY GOODMAN: And that was Jerry Nadler, New York congressmember, who represented the ground zero area, chairing the meeting, Christine Todd Whitman being questioned by Florida Democratic Congressmember Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Before we go to break and then hear the story of Joe Zadroga — you may think you know it, because his name is on the law, but I don’t think you know the details. Juan, your comment on what Christine Todd Whitman was saying and the information that was being suppressed from the highest levels? Nadler would go on to say that she and “America’s mayor,” Mayor Giuliani, should be tried for criminally negligent — for criminal negligence.

    JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, I think it’s important to recall the role of Rudy Giuliani, as well, because, you see, the EPA was a monitoring agency. The federal agency that should have assured the protection of all the people at ground zero was OSHA, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. And OSHA deliberately did not enforce its standards for working on a dangerous site like that, because Giuliani insisted that he was in charge. He was the incident commander on the pile, and he kept — he maintained his control of all information and all activity at the pile long after what should have been just a rescue operation. So, therefore, OSHA was not allowed by Mayor Giuliani to actually conduct its legally required business. And as a result, many, many people ended up being exposed and getting sick and not having proper protection. And we should never forget the role of Rudy Giuliani in allowing that situation to go on for so long.

    AMY GOODMAN: And that was very different at the Pentagon, which was also attacked, where they had the proper attire. We’re going to talk with Joe Zadroga in a minute. The bill is the James Zadroga Act, his son, who has since died. Stay with us.

    [break]

    AMY GOODMAN: “A Hunting We Will Go,” performed by The O’Neill Brothers. It was sung by Michael Williams in The Wire, well known for that, Michael Williams who has died at the age of 54 in Brooklyn.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Make Afghanistan the war to end all imperialist invasions

    The quick collapse of the puppet government in Afghanistan and its army should not come as a surprise given the imperialists’ criminal  record. Sue Bolton argues that Australia’s war criminals need to be held accountable.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • Forget Wars on Covid and Terror: War on Climate Collapse Is the Only War of Necessity for Human Survival

    Mythology of humans’ natural impulse for empathy

    Warfare has been a plague haunting the human species ever since our evolution to become Homo Sapiens, finally, around 300,000 years ago in Africa. Etymologically, homo means human and sapiens means wise or knowledgeable. One can see that in this 18th century anthropocentric characterization of our species, the notion of wisdom was highly overrated. What made our common Homo sapiens ancestors any wiser than the Neanderthals that they would eventually invade and annihilate? History is narrated by victors, therefore we were told that Homo sapiens were highly superior to the so-called brutal Neanderthals. It could be true in territorial ambitions, and some technological aspects, but it remains questionable in other area of social activity.

    Ultimately, a taste for adventure and conquest is what drove Homo sapiens to expand their territories on Earth. It would be utterly naive to think that this progressive form of colonization was accomplished through peaceful means. No, unfortunately for our species, a propensity for aggression, for domination through warfare was always present in Homo sapiens DNA.

    Wars of necessity or of choice: all wars are for profit

    Warfare in the 20th century was rather simple compared to today’s predicaments. Either during World War I or World War II, nations had traditional alliances which were usually respected and recognized by treaties. Usually formal declarations of wars were issued before a military action — with the exception of Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl-Harbor. The two wars were sold by leaders to their respective populations as wars of necessity. In both cases, they were still wars fought by conscripts, as professional soldiers, a euphemism for mercenaries, are usually not eager to become cannon fodder.

    While the United States cautiously, one could say cowardly, stood on the sideline during World War I until 1917, the conflict unquestionably triggered the Russian revolution, as poor Russians conscripts refused to fight the tsar’s war. As Marxist ideas were quickly spreading elsewhere in Europe, many French soldiers refused to fight their German brothers for the sake of capitalism. Many conscripts then knew that the so-called war of necessity was a scheme of war for profit. At the Versailles treaty, Germany was forced to pay an enormous amount to France, in gold, as war compensation. In the Middle East, in an even more substantial perennial spoils of war story, the two dominant empires of the time, the United Kingdom and France had grabbed for themselves the bulk of the Ottoman empire through the secret 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement.

    If you analyze the war of necessity versus war of choice, and correlation of war for profit during World War II, in the case of the United States, first you wonder what took the US so long to enter the war alongside their allies France and England? The answer is often murky, as many major US corporations such as Ford Motor and General Motors, as well as policymakers such as Joe Kennedy (father of JFK), had either vested economic interests in Nazi Germany or were upfront in their support for Adolf Hitler.

    Photo Credit:  from the archive of Recuerdos de Pandora

    Further, once the United States was attacked by Japan and finally committed to the European part of the conflict against Germany, a large part of Detroit’s manufacturing sector was converted to military purposes. In the United States, it is arguably more this massive war effort than FDR’s New Deal which turned the US economy into a juggernaut, in a dramatic recovery from the Great Depression, which the Wall Street crash of 1929 had started. Warfare writes human history using blood and tears for ink, but the merchants of death of the military-industrial complex and their financial market affiliates always profit handsomely.

    If slavery or slave labor is the ideal structure for capitalism, any war, under any pretext, is the perfect business venture, as it provides a fast consumption of goods (weapons and ammunition), cheap labor force using the leverage of patriotism — defend the motherland or fatherland — and infinite money to rebuild once capitalism’s wars for profit have turned everything to ruins and ashes. After World War II, the US Marshall Plan was painted as some great altruistic venture, but, in fact, it justified a long-term occupation of Germany and incredibly lucrative contracts, some of them aimed at controlling West Germany’s economy and government.

    Photo Credit:  Gilbert Mercier

    Rise of conceptual wars: war on terror and war on Covid

    If the wars of the 20th century were conventional as they either opposed sovereign nations or were in the context of imperial-colonial setback, like the French war in Indochina, Algeria’s independence war against France, some were specifically defined by the Cold War era, like the Korea war. From World War II at the Yalta conference, two new empires had emerged as dominant: the United States and the USSR. The world had then the predictability of this duality. The collapse of the Soviet Union altered this balance, but it took a bit more than a decade to make a quantum leap.

    Almost exactly 20 years ago, an event, the September 11, 2001 attack, radically changed the dynamic, as it marked the start of the conceptual war on terror. Terror is an effect, an emotion. How can one possibly wage war against an emotion? However absurd conceptually, this turning point in history allowed more or less all governments worldwide to embark into surveillance, obsession for security and a crackdown on personal liberties. Using the shock and fear in the population, which followed the collapse of the New York City Twin Towers in the US, a form of police state was almost immediately born using new administrative branches of government like the Department of Homeland Security. We still live in the post 9/11 world, as that coercive apparatus keep dragging on.

    Photo Credit: US Army archive

    Just like in standard, more conventional warfare, capitalism doesn’t create crises like 9/11, but seems always to find ways to benefit from it. In the war-on-terror era, a narrative also popular with Russia’s leader Vladimir Putin, the beneficiaries were and still are the global military-industrial complex, private security apparatus more like small private armies, and layers of police forces. How can one go wrong in terms of maximum profit?

    In complete haste, and with a massive international support, using the trauma to influence worldwide public opinion, an attack on Afghanistan was launched by NATO’s invincible armada. Were the Taliban governing the country at the time responsible for 9/11? Not so. Their fault was to host the man who was arguably the architect of the attack: enemy-number-one Osama bin-Laden, of course. The fact that most of the pilots who flew the planes into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were Saudi Arabian nationals was not even dismissed, it wasn’t even publicly considered by governments or the corporate controlled mainstream media.

    As matter of fact, many families of the 9/11 Twin Towers attack victims are still trying to get a sense of closure on a potential involvement of Saudi Arabia, at the highest level, in the tragedy to this day without much success, as a form of foreign policy Omerta seems to prevail in the US with the Saudis royal family. This was certainly not a war of necessity, it barely qualified as a war of choice, as it was a pure fit of anger against an individual and his relatively small organization, not even against a state.

    Photo Credit: US Army archive

    Twenty years later, back to square one, with the Taliban in control of Afghanistan affairs, but NATO, the military coalition of the impulsive and ill informed, are still not candidly making mea culpa, and admitting their gross ineptitude and almost criminal negligence. Colossal failure was always written all over Afghanistan’s bullets ridden walls, mosques and even modest fruit stands! Quagmires were also perfectly predictable in the war on terror sequels in Iraq; Libya (using French/Anglo/UAE proxies); Syria (using proxy good Jihadists), then ISIS (once many of the good Sunni Jihadists somehow decided to turn bad). Described like this the 20-year war on terror’s horrendous fiascos sound like the theater of the absurd! Absurd for the successive policy makers and incompetent or corrupt planners, but tragic for the almost one million dead and their surviving families, the 38 million refugees or internally displaced, and countries like Libya, turned into wrecked failed states. Meanwhile the military-industrial complex, including the private contractors, has become more powerful than ever.

    The tragically failed policies of the past 20 years have to be quantified. According to Brown University Watson Institute, and this is a conservative estimate, the human cost of post 9/11 wars is around 800,000 in direct deaths; 38 million people worldwide is the number of war refugees and displaced persons collateral victims of the war on terror; and finally, the US war on terror spending from 2001 to 2020 was $6.4 trillion. All this money extracted from the US taxpayers, and enthusiastically approved in Congress by both Democrats and Republicans, was injected into the private corporations of the military-industrial complex, the Pentagon, of course, to a lesser extent, and ultimately as a billionaire-making cash bonanza into Wall Street and all global financial markets. How it works is rather simple: below are two prime examples, among countless other similar schemes, to profit from the war machine.

    Photo Credit: from the Christopher Dombres archive

    One quick example of war for mega-profit comes to mind. Before he accepted to be George W. Bush’s running mate in 2000, Dick Cheney was the CEO of the giant construction, oil and mineral extraction firm Halliburton. Right before he started to campaign, he, of course, resigned from his CEO function and sold his huge Halliburton stock portfolio to avoid conflict of interests. Fast forward to 2003, and guess which firm is getting the lion share of private contracts for the Iraq war? Halliburton, of course. Coincidence? Hard to believe. Such example of vast sums of money being recycled from the taxpayers’ pocket book to the coffers of private companies war profiteers are countless.

    The other example is the major weapon systems manufacturer Lockheed Martin. Lockheed Martin manufactures fighter jets like F-15, F-16, F-35, and F-21; helicopters like Blackhawks and Cyclone, as well as Drones. On January 19, 2000 the share value for Lockheed Martin was $12.10. By January 17, 2020 Lockheed Martin stock traded at $408.77 a share. The bottom line: who in the US Congress would dare to say no to funding the military-industrial complex via the US Defense Department budget? Basically nobody. It would be deemed unpatriotic and bad for the job market, considering that the military-industrial complex employs a lot of people.

    Terror is out, global pandemic is in

    One cannot help making an analogy between the war on terror and the new global war for profit, which is the war on Covid. As the war on terror is being exposed as a complete fiasco and receding in history’s rear view mirror, global capitalism needed something else. It magically materialized as a global biological warfare against a virus.What a golden opportunity! Since March 2020 — a bit later in the crisis actually — the beneficiaries of the war on Covid have been, not only pharmaceutical companies, but also digital giants that benefit from remote-location work due to measures like lockdowns, online commerce; and, finally, the global financial markets.

    France’s President Macron was, to my knowledge, the very first world leader to use the bellicose semantic of war on Covid. He did it in March 2020. We have seen previously that the war on terror has been immensely profitable for the nexus of global corporate imperialism, but the recent war on Covid could be even more profitable, as its protagonists/profiteers appear to be benevolent, even altruistic. The current push worldwide, and Macron was once again ahead of the game, is either to make vaccination mandatory, or blackmail the population with coercive measures like the Pass Sanitaire in France, to obey and comply.

    This is the calculus and assumption that all governments and biotech affiliates are likely making. Let’s say that they manage to make vaccination mandatory. Worldwide, you would have a captive market of around 7.8 billion people. Even if 800 million people globally resist vaccination, we are talking about an extraordinarily profitable market. At around $15 per dose for the best-adopted vaccines on the market, which are from Pfizer and Moderna, multiplied by two, or even better by three, as is now recommended by pharmaceutical companies and some governments, because of the Delta variant, we are talking about some serious cash flow. With booster jabs likely recommended down the line every nine months or so, we are talking about a biotech Eldorado!

    Photo Credit:  Jeremy Hunsinger

    As an example of the heavenly jolt of joy vaccines have already injected into the arms of the Masters of the Universe of global finance, Moderna stock on January 2, 2020 traded at $19.57 a share. On August 11, 2021, Moderna stock traded on Wall Street at $440.00 a share. It is rather obvious, besides various stimulus package schemes applied in all countries to boost economies and prevent a massive Covid economic recession, global financial markets, with the big hedge funds pulling the strings, have become addicted to vaccines. It is no wonder that all major Wall Street firms such as Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have already made vaccination mandatory for their employees. It is no wonder either, why stock markets, like the CAC40 in France, have reached record high despite a severe contraction of the real economy.

    I previously mentioned the real cost of the 20-year war on terror as being $6.4 trillion for the United States alone. It is not yet possible to quantify the real cost of the so-called global war on Covid. One can suspect it will be very high as well, and its human cost higher in term of diminished personal liberties. The negative side effects of the war on Covid are mainly sociological and psychological, as it has already increased human isolation and fragmented communities. This 18-month old pseudo war on a virus has also withdrawn global resources and focus from the only war of necessity, the one critical for our species survival: namely the war on climate collapse.

    War on climate collapse is a war against capitalism

    The war on Covid could even last longer than the war on terror. Cynically, the reason for this is that the war on Covid has worked wonders for the benefit of corporations and the super-rich. It has also allowed for governments that are supposed to be neoliberal economically and progressive socially to become paradoxically authoritarian. A prime example, in this instance, is again Emmanuel Macron’s government in France. As long as wars, invented or not, either conventional or conceptual, can be used to extract a profit, they will remain the modus operandi for the billionaire class and their political surrogates. It might sound Utopian, but let’s just imagine for a moment what humanity could do collectively to address the climate crisis existential threat, if we were going to implement a global policy of massive cuts in military spending and security apparatus.

    Trillion of dollars could be allocated to the true emergency that will determine our survival or extinction. What could be more critical than this for our children and grandchildren? Climate collapse is on its way. During this entire summer, large areas of Earth were on fire, and others were flooded. Killer storms will keep coming relentlessly at us. Before 2050 many coastlines will be submerged, causing more than 1 billion people worldwide to become the climate collapse refugees. This is not a projection or speculation, it is documented by the scientific community.

    Unfortunately, the reason why our Banana Republic styles of governments are not willing to fight this war of necessity, the war on climate change, is because it can only be really fought by getting rid of the capitalist system altogether. Radical approaches are needed, such as scrapping capitalism’s holy precept of permanent economic growth and its correlation of population growth. The remedies to try to mitigate the unfolding climate collapse would be many tough pills to swallow, because it’s about drastic systemic changes. Such as a zero-growth, sometime called negative-growth, economic model, which even Green parties at large do not embrace. The notion of Green New Deal is ludicrous. Green politicians either do not get it or are complete hypocrites if they are not also staunch anti-capitalists.

    Another issue almost never addressed by Green politicians anywhere is the one of overpopulation. The rapid growth of the human population is a fundamental factor for capitalism as it provides two critical elements: plenty of cheap labor as well as a continuously growing consumption base. Case in point, in 1850 or at the start of the industrial revolution, the global world population stood at around 1 billion people; currently, or 171 years later and not much time in term of human history, it stands at around 7.8 billion. Some demographic projections forecast that it will reach between 10 to 13 billion by 2100. Needless to say, from a purely physical standpoint, this is entirely unsustainable as the surface of Earth’s landmass has gone unchanged. The problem with overpopulation, as an issue, is that almost everyone in every culture rightly views his or her ability to procreate as a fundamental right. My News Junkie Post partner, Dady Chery, and I, we know that even to bring up overpopulation as an issue is extremely unpopular. However, it has to be done.

    Without a massive reduction in carbon emissions, we are on track to pass the fatal mark of a 2-degree Celsius global warming, not by 2050 but by 2035. In other words, a wrench has to be jammed into the gear of the infernal machine created by humans since the mid-19th century’s industrial revolution. Carbon emitting fossil fuels, of any kind, have to stay in the ground. Combustion vehicles should be banned promptly, and massive subsidies should be given to produce extremely affordable and fully electrical cars immediately.

    Photo Credit: US Army archive

    Many in the West point the finger at the big carbon emitters, which are China, India and Brazil. But they are not the only culprits for the nearly criminal inaction of our governing instances. The populations of countries that rely heavily on extraction must put a severe pressure on their politicians or vote them out of office. One thinks, of course, of the Gulf’s usual suspects like Saudi-Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, but other major players are almost as nefarious as far as having an economy built on energy or mineral extraction. A short list of the main countries heavily involved in the fossil fuel extraction business, either for domestic consumption or exports, would be: Russia, The United States, Canada, Iraq, Libya, Venezuela, and Iran.

    Would the various radical changes – including capping human population growth- which seem to be objectively needed be painful? Certainly. But the alternative option, which is basically to keep the course of this giant high-speed bullet train without a pilot that is global capitalism, amounts to a medium-term collective suicide.

    The post Forget Wars on Covid and Terror: War on Climate Collapse Is the Only War of Necessity for Human Survival first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Gilbert Mercier.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Will the Voices of Those Who Were Always Right on Afghanistan Still Be Ignored?

    CODEPINK Members Midge Potts and Medea Benjamin march during a protest against escalation of the war in Afghanistan in front of the White House on December 1, 2009, in Washington, D.C.

    America’s corporate media are ringing with recriminations over the humiliating U.S. military defeat in Afghanistan. But very little of the criticism goes to the root of the problem, which was the original decision to militarily invade and occupy Afghanistan in the first place.

    That decision set in motion a cycle of violence and chaos that no subsequent U.S. policy or military strategy could resolve over the next 20 years, in Afghanistan, Iraq or any of the other countries swept up in America’s post-9/11 wars.

    While Americans were reeling in shock at the images of airliners crashing into buildings on Sept. 11, 2001, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld held a meeting in an intact part of the Pentagon. Undersecretary Stephen Cambone’s notes from that meeting spell out how quickly and blindly U.S. officials prepared to plunge our nation into graveyards of empire in Afghanistan, Iraq and beyond.

    Cambone wrote that Rumsfeld wanted, “best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H. [Saddam Hussein] at same time — not only UBL [Usama bin Laden].… Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not.”

    So within hours of these horrific crimes in the United States, the central question senior U.S. officials were asking was not how to investigate them and hold the perpetrators accountable, but how to use this “Pearl Harbor” moment to justify wars, regime changes and militarism on a global scale.

    Three days later, Congress passed a bill authorizing the president to use military force “against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons.”

    In 2016, the Congressional Research Service reported that this Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) had been cited to justify 37 distinct military operations in 14 different countries and at sea. The vast majority of the people killed, maimed or displaced in these operations had nothing to do with the crimes of September 11. Successive administrations have repeatedly ignored the actual wording of the authorization, which only authorized the use of force against those involved in some way in the 9/11 attacks.

    The only member of Congress who had the wisdom and courage to vote against the 2001 AUMF was Rep. Barbara Lee of Oakland, California. Lee compared it to the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin resolution and warned her colleagues that it would inevitably be used in the same expansive and illegitimate way. The final words of her floor speech echo presciently through the 20-year-long spiral of violence, chaos and war crimes it unleashed, “As we act, let us not become the evil we deplore.”

    In a meeting at Camp David that weekend, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz argued forcefully for an attack on Iraq, even before Afghanistan. President George W. Bush insisted that Afghanistan must come first, but privately promised Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle that Iraq would be their next target.

    In the days after September 11, the U.S. corporate media followed the Bush administration’s lead, and the public heard only rare, isolated voices questioning whether war was the correct response to the crimes committed.

    But former Nuremberg war crimes prosecutor Ben Ferencz spoke to NPR a week after 9/11, and he explained that attacking Afghanistan was not only unwise and dangerous, but was not a legitimate response to these crimes. NPR’s Katy Clark struggled to understand what he was saying:

    Clark: Do you think that the talk of retaliation is not a legitimate response to the death of 5,000 (sic) people?

    Ferencz: It is never a legitimate response to punish people who are not responsible for the wrong done.

    Clark: No one is saying we’re going to punish those who are not responsible.

    Ferencz: We must make a distinction between punishing the guilty and punishing others. If you simply retaliate en masse by bombing Afghanistan, let us say, or the Taliban, you will kill many people who don’t believe in what has happened, who don’t approve of what has happened.

    Clark: So you are saying that you see no appropriate role for the military in this.

    Ferencz: I wouldn’t say there is no appropriate role, but the role should be consistent with our ideals. We shouldn’t let them kill our principles at the same time they kill our people. And our principles are respect for the rule of law. Not charging in blindly and killing people because we are blinded by our tears and our rage.

    The drumbeat of war pervaded the airwaves, twisting 9/11 into a powerful propaganda narrative to whip up the fear of terrorism and justify the march to war. But many Americans shared the reservations of Lee and Ferencz, understanding enough of their country’s history to recognize that the 9/11 tragedy was being hijacked by the same military-industrial complex that produced the debacle in Vietnam and keeps reinventing itself generation after generation to support and profit from American wars, coups and militarism.

    On Sept. 28, 2001, the Socialist Worker website published statements by 15 writers and activists under the heading, “Why we say no to war and hate.” They included Noam Chomsky, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan and a co-author of this article (Medea Benjamin). Our statements took aim at the Bush administration’s attacks on civil liberties at home and abroad, as well as its plans for war on Afghanistan.

    The late academic and author Chalmers Johnson wrote that 9/11 was not an attack on the United States but “an attack on U.S. foreign policy.” Edward Herman predicted “massive civilian casualties.” Matt Rothschild, editor of The Progressive, wrote that, “For every innocent person Bush kills in this war, five or ten terrorists will arise.” I (Medea) wrote that “a military response will only create more of the hatred against the U.S. that created this terrorism in the first place.”

    Our analysis was correct and our predictions were prescient. We humbly submit that the media and politicians should start listening to the voices of peace and sanity instead of to lying, delusional warmongers.

    What leads to catastrophes like the U.S. war in Afghanistan is not the absence of convincing antiwar voices but the fact that our political and media systems routinely marginalize and ignore voices like those of Barbara Lee, Ben Ferencz and ourselves.

    That is not because we are wrong and the belligerent voices they listen to are right. They marginalize us precisely because we are right and they are wrong, and because serious, rational debates over war, peace and military spending would jeopardize some of the most powerful and corrupt vested interests that dominate and control U.S. politics on a bipartisan basis.

    In every foreign policy crisis, the very existence of our military’s enormous destructive capacity and the myths our leaders promote to justify it converge in an orgy of self-serving interests and political pressures to stoke our fears and pretend that they have military “solutions.”

    Losing the Vietnam War was a serious reality check on the limits of U.S. military power. As the junior officers who fought in Vietnam rose through the ranks to become America’s military leaders, they acted more cautiously and realistically for the next 20 years. But the end of the Cold War opened the door to an ambitious new generation of warmongers who were determined to capitalize on the U.S. post-Cold War “power dividend.”

    Madeleine Albright spoke for this emerging new breed of war hawks when she confronted Gen. Colin Powell in 1992 with her question, “What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?”

    As secretary of state in Bill Clinton’s second term, Albright engineered the first of a series of illegal U.S. invasions to carve out an independent Kosovo from the splintered remains of Yugoslavia. When U.K. Foreign Secretary Robin Cook told her his government was “having trouble with our lawyers” over the legality of the NATO war plan, Albright said they should just “get new lawyers.”

    In the 1990s, the neocons and liberal interventionists dismissed and marginalized the idea that non-military, non-coercive approaches can more effectively resolve foreign policy problems without the horrors of war or deadly sanctions. This bipartisan war lobby then exploited the 9/11 attacks to consolidate and expand its control of U.S. foreign policy.

    But after spending trillions of dollars and killing millions of people, the abysmal record of U.S. war-making since World War II remains a tragic litany of failure and defeat, even on its own terms. The only wars the United States has won since 1945 have been limited wars to recover small neocolonial outposts in Grenada, Panama and Kuwait.

    Every time the United States has expanded its military ambitions to attack or invade larger or more independent countries, the results have been universally catastrophic. So our country’s absurd investment of 66% of discretionary federal spending in destructive weapons, and recruiting and training young Americans to use them, does not make us safer. It only encourages our leaders to unleash pointless violence and chaos on our neighbors around the world.

    Most of our neighbors have grasped by now that these forces and the dysfunctional U.S. political system that keeps them at its disposal pose a serious threat to peace and to their own aspirations for democracy. Few people in other countries want any part of America’s wars, or its revived Cold War against China and Russia. These trends are most pronounced among America’s longtime allies in Europe and in its traditional “backyard” in Canada and Latin America.

    On Oct. 19, 2001, Rumsfeld addressed B-2 bomber crews at Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri as they prepared to take off across the world to inflict misdirected vengeance on the long-suffering people of Afghanistan. He told them, “We have two choices. Either we change the way we live, or we must change the way they live. We choose the latter. And you are the ones who will help achieve that goal.”

    Now that dropping more than 80,000 bombs and missiles on the people of Afghanistan over the course of 20 years has failed to change the way “they” live, apart from killing hundreds of thousands of them and destroying their homes, we must instead, as Rumsfeld said, change the way we live.

    We should start by finally listening to Barbara Lee. First, we should pass her bill to repeal the two post-9/11 AUMFs that launched our 20-year fiasco in Afghanistan and other wars in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia and Yemen.

    Then we should pass her bill to redirect $350 billion per year from the U.S. military budget (roughly a 50% cut) to “increase our diplomatic capacity and for domestic programs that will keep our Nation and our people safer.”

    Finally reining in America’s out-of-control militarism would be a wise and appropriate response to its epic defeat in Afghanistan, before the same corrupt interests drag us into even more dangerous wars against more formidable enemies than the Taliban.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Will Americans Who Were Right on Afghanistan Still Be Ignored?

    Protest in Westwood, California 2002. Photo: Carolyn Cole/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

    America’s corporate media are ringing with recriminations over the humiliating U.S. military defeat in Afghanistan. But very little of the criticism goes to the root of the problem, which was the original decision to militarily invade and occupy Afghanistan in the first place.

    That decision set in motion a cycle of violence and chaos that no subsequent U.S. policy or military strategy could resolve over the next 20 years, in Afghanistan, Iraq or any of the other countries swept up in America’s post-9/11 wars.

    While Americans were reeling in shock at the images of airliners crashing into buildings on September 11, 2001, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld held a meeting in an intact part of the Pentagon. Undersecretary Cambone’s notes from that meeting spell out how quickly and blindly U.S. officials prepared to plunge our nation into graveyards of empire in Afghanistan, Iraq and beyond.

    Cambone wrote that Rumsfeld wanted “…best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H. (Saddam Hussein) at same time – not only UBL (Usama Bin Laden)… Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not.”

    So within hours of these horrific crimes in the United States, the central question senior U.S. officials were asking was not how to investigate them and hold the perpetrators accountable, but how to use this “Pearl Harbor” moment to justify wars, regime changes and militarism on a global scale.

    Three days later, Congress passed a bill authorizing the president to use military force “…against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons…”

    In 2016, the Congressional Research Service reported that this Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) had been cited to justify 37 distinct military operations in 14 different countries and at sea. The vast majority of the people killed, maimed or displaced in these operations had nothing to do with the crimes of September 11. Successive administrations have repeatedly ignored the actual wording of the authorization, which only authorized the use of force against those involved in some way in the 9/11 attacks.

    The only member of Congress who had the wisdom and courage to vote against the 2001 AUMF was Barbara Lee of Oakland. Lee compared it to the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin resolution and warned her colleagues that it would inevitably be used in the same expansive and illegitimate way. The final words of her floor speech echo presciently through the 20-year-long spiral of violence, chaos and war crimes it unleashed, “As we act, let us not become the evil we deplore.”

    In a meeting at Camp David that weekend, Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz argued forcefully for an attack on Iraq, even before Afghanistan. Bush insisted Afghanistan must come first, but privately promised Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle that Iraq would be their next target.

    In the days after September 11, the U.S. corporate media followed the Bush administration’s lead, and the public heard only rare, isolated voices questioning whether war was the correct response to the crimes committed.

    But former Nuremberg war crimes prosecutor Ben Ferencz spoke to NPR (National Public Radio) a week after 9/11, and he explained that attacking Afghanistan was not only unwise and dangerous, but was not a legitimate response to these crimes. NPR’s Katy Clark struggled to understand what he was saying:

    Clark: …do you think that the talk of retaliation is not a legitimate response to the death of 5,000 (sic) people?

    Ferencz: It is never a legitimate response to punish people who are not responsible for the wrong done.

    Clark: No one is saying we’re going to punish those who are not responsible.

    Ferencz:  We must make a distinction between punishing the guilty and punishing others. If you simply retaliate en masse by bombing Afghanistan, let us say, or the Taliban, you will kill many people who don’t believe in what has happened, who don’t approve of what has happened.

    Clark:  So you are saying that you see no appropriate role for the military in this.

    Ferencz: I wouldn’t say there is no appropriate role, but the role should be consistent with our ideals. We shouldn’t let them kill our principles at the same time they kill our people. And our principles are respect for the rule of law. Not charging in blindly and killing people because we are blinded by our tears and our rage.

    The drumbeat of war pervaded the airwaves, twisting 9/11 into a powerful propaganda narrative to whip up the fear of terrorism and justify the march to war. But many Americans shared the reservations of Rep. Barbara Lee and Ben Ferencz, understanding enough of their country’s history to recognize that the 9/11 tragedy was being hijacked by the same military-industrial complex that produced the debacle in Vietnam and keeps reinventing itself generation after generation to support and profit from American wars, coups and militarism.

    On September 28, 2001, the Socialist Worker website published statements by 15 writers and activists under the heading, “Why we say no to war and hate.” They included Noam Chomsky, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan and me (Medea). Our statements took aim at the Bush administration’s attacks on civil liberties at home and abroad, as well as its plans for war on Afghanistan.

    The late academic and author Chalmers Johnson wrote that 9/11 was not an attack on the United States but “an attack on U.S. foreign policy.” Edward Herman predicted “massive civilian casualties.” Matt Rothschild, the editor of The Progressive magazine, wrote that, “For every innocent person Bush kills in this war, five or ten terrorists will arise.” I (Medea) wrote that ”a military response will only create more of the hatred against the U.S. that created this terrorism in the first place.”

    Our analysis was correct and our predictions were prescient. We humbly submit that the media and politicians should start listening to the voices of peace and sanity instead of to lying, delusional warmongers.

    What leads to catastrophes like the U.S. war in Afghanistan is not the absence of convincing anti-war voices but that our political and media systems routinely marginalize and ignore voices like those of Barbara Lee, Ben Ferencz and ourselves.

    That is not because we are wrong and the belligerent voices they listen to are right. They marginalize us precisely because we are right and they are wrong, and because serious, rational debates over war, peace and military spending would jeopardize some of the most powerful and corrupt vested interests that dominate and control U.S. politics on a bipartisan basis.

    In every foreign policy crisis, the very existence of our military’s enormous destructive capacity and the myths our leaders promote to justify it converge in an orgy of self-serving interests and political pressures to stoke our fears and pretend that there are military “solutions” for them.

    Losing the Vietnam War was a serious reality check on the limits of U.S. military power. As the junior officers who fought in Vietnam rose through the ranks to become America’s military leaders, they acted more cautiously and realistically for the next 20 years. But the end of the Cold War opened the door to an ambitious new generation of warmongers who were determined to capitalize on the U.S. post-Cold War “power dividend“.

    Madeleine Albright spoke for this emerging new breed of war-hawks when she confronted General Colin Powell in 1992 with her question, “What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?”

    As Secretary of State in Clinton’s second term, Albright engineered the first of a series of illegal U.S. invasions to carve out an independent Kosovo from the splintered remains of Yugoslavia. When U.K. Foreign Secretary Robin Cook told her his government was “having trouble with our lawyers” over the illegality of the NATO war plan, Albright said they should just “get new lawyers.”

    In the 1990s, the neocons and liberal interventionists dismissed and marginalized the idea that non-military, non-coercive approaches can more effectively resolve foreign policy problems without the horrors of war or deadly sanctions. This bipartisan war lobby then exploited the 9/11 attacks to consolidate and expand their control of U.S. foreign policy.

    But after spending trillions of dollars and killing millions of people, the abysmal record of U.S. war-making since World War II remains a tragic litany of failure and defeat, even on its own terms. The only wars the United States has won since 1945 have been limited wars to recover small neocolonial outposts in Grenada, Panama and Kuwait.

    Every time the United States has expanded its military ambitions to attack or invade larger or more independent countries, the results have been universally catastrophic. So our country’s absurd investment of 66% of discretionary federal spending in destructive weapons, and recruiting and training young Americans to use them, does not make us safer but only encourages our leaders to unleash pointless violence and chaos on our neighbors around the world.

    Most of our neighbors have grasped by now that these forces and the dysfunctional U.S. political system that keeps them at its disposal pose a serious threat to peace and to their own aspirations for democracy. Few people in other countries want any part of America’s wars, or its revived Cold War against China and Russia, and these trends are most pronounced among America’s long-time allies in Europe and in its traditional “backyard” in Canada and Latin America.

    On October 19, 2001, Donald Rumsfeld addressed B-2 bomber crews at Whiteman AFB in Missouri as they prepared to take off across the world to inflict misdirected vengeance on the long-suffering people of Afghanistan. He told them, “We have two choices. Either we change the way we live, or we must change the way they live. We choose the latter. And you are the ones who will help achieve that goal.”

    Now that dropping over 80,000 bombs and missiles on the people of Afghanistan for 20 years has failed to change the way they live, apart from killing hundreds of thousands of them and destroying their homes, we must instead, as Rumsfeld said, change the way we live.

    We should start by finally listening to Barbara Lee. First, we should pass her bill to repeal the two post-9/11 AUMFs that launched our 20-year fiasco in Afghanistan and other wars in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia and Yemen.

    Then we should  pass her bill to redirect $350 billion per year from the U.S. military budget (roughly a 50% cut) to “increase our diplomatic capacity and for domestic programs that will keep our Nation and our people safer.”

    Finally reining in America’s out-of-control militarism would be a wise and appropriate response to its epic defeat in Afghanistan, before the same corrupt interests drag us into even more dangerous wars against more formidable enemies than the Taliban.

     

    The post Will Americans Who Were Right on Afghanistan Still Be Ignored? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The US’s “War on Terror” Fueled and Excused Right-Wing Extremism at Home

    As Republicans raise concerns that Biden’s withdrawal of U.S. troops will turn Afghanistan “back to a pre-9/11 state — a breeding ground for terrorism,” Pulitzer Prize-winning national security reporter Spencer Ackerman lays out how the U.S. war on terror after the September 2001 attacks actually fueled white, right-wing extremism. Ackerman says U.S. elites consciously chose to ignore “the kind of terrorism that is the oldest, most resilient, most violent and most historically rooted in American history.” His new book is Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump.

    Please check back later for full transcript.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Release Details Of Saudi Involvement Or Stay Away From Memorials

    Nearly 1,800 family members, survivors, and first responders who were affected by the September 11 attacks are intensifying pressure on the federal government to declassify information that they believe points to Saudi leaders’ involvement in or support for the attacks, with the group calling on President Joe Biden to stay away from next month’s 20th anniversary memorial events unless he releases the documents first.

    The family members and survivors say PENTTBOM, the FBI’s investigation that wrapped up in 2016, uncovered support provided by Saudi officials for the attackers. The Obama and Trump administrations both declined to declassify documents from the probe, citing national security concerns.

    The post Release Details Of Saudi Involvement Or Stay Away From Memorials appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.