The 9/11 question the US does not want to ask

[martingale]

With all the coverage given in the last week to the 9/11 Commission report in the US mainstream media, virtually every aspect of what happened on 9/11/2001 was discussed in great detail except for one: WHY did it happened? In particular, the US media avoided like the plague the most fundamental question of all: What is the relationship between US foreign policy and the attacks of 9/11/2001? I remembered reading a couple of articles shortly after that fateful date that attempted to explain why there is this remarkable silence on this most basic of questions concerning that epochal event, a silence that has continued to the present (I'm here discounting the childish and idiotic explanation offered by the Bush administration --- that the suicide bombers attacked the US because they hated the freedoms and envied the wealth of the world's remaining superpower).

Here is the first article:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,...,551036,00.html (http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,551036,00.html)

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They can't see why they are hated

Americans cannot ignore what their government does abroad

Special report: Terrorism in the US

Seumas Milne
Thursday September 13, 2001
The Guardian

Nearly two days after the horrific suicide attacks on civilian workers in New York and Washington, it has become painfully clear that most Americans simply don't get it. From the president to passersby on the streets, the message seems to be the same: this is an inexplicable assault on freedom and democracy, which must be answered with overwhelming force - just as soon as someone can construct a credible account of who was actually responsible.
Shock, rage and grief there has been aplenty. But any glimmer of recognition of why people might have been driven to carry out such atrocities, sacrificing their own lives in the process - or why the United States is hated with such bitterness, not only in Arab and Muslim countries, but across the developing world - seems almost entirely absent. Perhaps it is too much to hope that, as rescue workers struggle to pull firefighters from the rubble, any but a small minority might make the connection between what has been visited upon them and what their government has visited upon large parts of the world.

But make that connection they must, if such tragedies are not to be repeated, potentially with even more devastating consequences. US political leaders are doing their people no favours by reinforcing popular ignorance with self-referential rhetoric. And the echoing chorus of Tony Blair, whose determination to bind Britain ever closer to US foreign policy ratchets up the threat to our own cities, will only fuel anti-western sentiment. So will calls for the defence of "civilisation", with its overtones of Samuel Huntington's poisonous theories of post-cold war confrontation between the west and Islam, heightening perceptions of racism and hypocrisy.

As Mahatma Gandhi famously remarked when asked his opinion of western civilisation, it would be a good idea. Since George Bush's father inaugurated his new world order a decade ago, the US, supported by its British ally, bestrides the world like a colossus. Unconstrained by any superpower rival or system of global governance, the US giant has rewritten the global financial and trading system in its own interest; ripped up a string of treaties it finds inconvenient; sent troops to every corner of the globe; bombed Afghanistan, Sudan, Yugoslavia and Iraq without troubling the United Nations; maintained a string of murderous embargos against recalcitrant regimes; and recklessly thrown its weight behind Israel's 34-year illegal military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza as the Palestinian intifada rages.

If, as yesterday's Wall Street Journal insisted, the east coast carnage was the fruit of the Clinton administration's Munich-like appeasement of the Palestinians, the mind boggles as to what US Republicans imagine to be a Churchillian response.

It is this record of unabashed national egotism and arrogance that drives anti-Americanism among swaths of the world's population, for whom there is little democracy in the current distribution of global wealth and power. If it turns out that Tuesday's attacks were the work of Osama bin Laden's supporters, the sense that the Americans are once again reaping a dragons' teeth harvest they themselves sowed will be overwhelming.

It was the Americans, after all, who poured resources into the 1980s war against the Soviet-backed regime in Kabul, at a time when girls could go to school and women to work. Bin Laden and his mojahedin were armed and trained by the CIA and MI6, as Afghanistan was turned into a wasteland and its communist leader Najibullah left hanging from a Kabul lamp post with his genitals stuffed in his mouth.

But by then Bin Laden had turned against his American sponsors, while US-sponsored Pakistani intelligence had spawned the grotesque Taliban now protecting him. To punish its wayward Afghan offspring, the US subsequently forced through a sanctions regime which has helped push 4m to the brink of starvation, according to the latest UN figures, while Afghan refugees fan out across the world.

All this must doubtless seem remote to Americans desperately searching the debris of what is expected to be the largest-ever massacre on US soil - as must the killings of yet more Palestinians in the West Bank yesterday, or even the 2m estimated to have died in Congo's wars since the overthrow of the US-backed Mobutu regime. "What could some political thing have to do with blowing up office buildings during working hours?" one bewildered New Yorker asked yesterday.

Already, the Bush administration is assembling an international coalition for an Israeli-style war against terrorism, as if such counter-productive acts of outrage had an existence separate from the social conditions out of which they arise. But for every "terror network" that is rooted out, another will emerge - until the injustices and inequalities that produce them are addressed.
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[martingale]

Here is the second article:
http://www.zmag.org/bricmontcalam.htm

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The End of the "End of History"

Jean Bricmont

Everything was going smoothly. Serbia, on its knees, had just sold Milosevic to the International Criminal Tribune for a fistful of dollars (most of which turned out to be earmarked to pay debts going back to Tito's time). NATO was expanding eastwards toward a powerless Russia. Saddam Hussein could be safely bombed whenever one felt like it. Invaded by UCK, Macedonia was obliged to accept the farce of a disarmament of that same UCK by the very ones who armed it in the first place. The Palestinian territories were under tight control while their leaders were assassinated by smart bombs. For the past few years, stockholders had been making record profits. The political left had died out and all political parties had rallied to neoliberalism and "humanitarian" interventionism. In short, as certain commentators put it, we were living in peace.

Then suddenly shock, surprise, horror: the greatest power of all times, the only truly universal empire struck in its very heart, at the center of its wealth and power. A unique and all-powerful electronic spying network, unparalleled security measures, a staggering defense budget -- none of this was of any use in preventing the catastrophe.

Let us be perfectly clear. We do not share the attitude expressed by Madeleine Albright when she was asked whether pursuing the embargo against Iraq was worth the price of half a million Iraqi children who have died: "this is a very hard choice, but we think the price is worth it", she replied. The massacre of innocent civilians is never acceptable. But this does not mean we should not try to understand the underlying meaning of that incredible attack.

The American pacifist A. J. Muste once remarked that the problem in every war was posed by the winning side: the victor had learned that violence succeeded. The whole of postwar history illustrates the pertinence of that observation. In the United States, the War Department was renamed Defense Department, precisely when there was no direct danger threatening the country, and one government after the other launched campaigns of military intervention and political destabilisation in the guise of containing communism -- against moderately nationalist governments such as that of Goulart in Brazil, Mossadegh in Iran or Arbenz in Guatemala. To limit ourselves to the present, let us examine a few questions rarely raised concerning Western, especially American, policy.

- The Kyoto protocol: the principal United States objection is not on scientific grounds, but merely that "it is bad for our economy". What are people who work 12 hours a day for slave wages to make of such a reaction?

- The Durban conference. The West rejects the slightest thought of reparations for slavery and colonialism. But isn't it clear that the State of Israel functions as a form of reparations for anti-Semitic persecutions, except that in this case the price is paid by the Palestinian Arabs for the crimes committed by Europeans? And isn't it obvious that this shift of responsibility must be felt as a sort of racism by the victims of colonialism?

- Macedonia: here is a country that the West pushed into independence in order to weaken Serbia and whose government has always faithfully followed Western orders. As a result it has been subjected to attacks by terrorists armed by NATO and coming from territory under NATO control. How does this look to Slavic Orthodox peoples, especially after the expulsion, as NATO looks on, of the Serbian population of Kosovo and the eradication of a large part of its cultural heritage?

- Afghanistan: it is too quickly forgotten that Osama Bin Laden was trained and armed by the Americans, who openly admit that they were using Afghanistan to destabilize the USSR even before the Soviet intervention. How many people have died in the game that former President Carter's adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, calls "the great chessboard"? And how many terrorists, in Asia, in Central America, in the Balkans, or in the Middle East, are left to run loose after having been used by the "Free World"?

- Iraq: for ten years the population has been strangled by an embargo that has caused hundreds of thousands of deaths -- of civilian victims. All because Iraq tried to recover the oil wells that were de facto confiscated from them by the British. Let us just compare the treatment given Israel for its totally illegal occupation of territories conquered in 1967. Is it really likely that the notion, generally accepted in the West, that Saddam Hussein is to blame for everything, makes much sense in the Arab-Muslim world?

By pure coincidence, the September 11 attacks took place on the anniversary of the overthrow of Allende, which not only marked (a fact easily forgotten) the installation of the first neoliberal government, that of General Pinochet, but also the start of a broad movement against national and independent movements in the Third World which was to lead those countries to bow to the dictates of the IMF.

This is why we suspect that in Latin America, in Indonesia, in Iran, in ruined and humiliated Russia, in China where nobody is fooled by attempts to destabilize this emerging giant, as well as in the Muslim world, the September 11 tragedy will cause people to shed little more than crocodile tears.

Of course there will be shouts of indignation and messages of sympathy. There will be applause for "firm responses" when they occur (will they destroy a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan or bomb the civilian population of an Arab country?). Large numbers of intellectuals will be found to produce clever analyses full of false analogies connecting these attacks to whatever it is they are against: Saddam Hussein, Kadhafi, Western pacifists and anti-imperialists, the Palestinian liberation movement or even China, Russia or North Korea. It will be repeated that such barbarism is totally alien to us: after all, we prefer to bomb from high altitude and kill gradually by means of embargos. But none of that will solve any basic problem. There is no use attacking revolt itself. What must be attacked is the suffering that produces revolt. Those attacks will have at least two negative political consequences. For one, the American population, already disturbingly nationalist, will "rally round the flag", as they put it, supporting their government however barbaric its policy. Americans will be more than ever determined to "protect our way of life" without asking the price to be paid by the rest of the planet. The timid movements of dissent that have emerged since Seattle will be marginalized if not criminalized.

On the other hand, millions of people who have been defeated, humiliated and crushed by the United States and the world it dominates will be tempted to see terrorism as the only weapon really capable of striking the Empire. This is why a truly political struggle -- not violence -- against the cultural, economic and above all military domination by a small minority over the vast majority of humanity is more necessary than ever before.
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[Guerrilla22]

Why did it happen? Why was this questioned not addressed? The answer is because it is obvious to anyone who knows the slightest about international politics, that the current US foreign policy towards the Middle-East (supporting imperialist regimes, such as Saudi Arabia, continiuing support for the apartheid government of Israel and the rapid expansion of US military presence in the mid east) is in fact the reason why we were attacked.

It also can be said that the US government was so obcessed with stopping the Soviet Union that it turned a blind eye towards fundamentalist, such as Bin Laden and even supported them. The US government, in fact helped al-Qaeda to grow and become the organizatio that it is is today. Ironic.

[Kurai Tsuki]

I've already written a text on, "why it happened," it could have been found by searching the history section.


Three years have now passed since the attacks of September 11 and still nobody in the mainstream media (or even in the independent or liberal media) seems to be making a significant effort to explain the true causes of terrorism. Terrorism, we’re asked to believe, happens purely because of Islamic extremism and has no provocation on the part of the United States. But for those of us who know the history of American and U.S. backed or trained interventions, bombings, aid to Israel, and torture in the Middle East, to believe this would be to lie to ourselves. In this text I intend to give the exact details of what the American and U.S. backed Israeli governments have done in the Middle East to provoke terrorist acts on their respective countries.

1. The first and most obvious act is America’s relationship with Israel and its funding of Israel’s brutality for the last fifty five years. Israel receives from America a total of three billion dollars per year in aid, taken from U.S. tax money, which they use for their continuous bombing of Palestinians and the occasional invasion, such as the invasion of Lebanon in 1982, in reaction to the Palestine Liberation Organization attacks of Israel from Lebanon (which were in turn done in reaction to the Zionists displacing most of the Palestinians when they invaded their homeland and took their homes). This invasion was not only done with American aid, but the United States military also took an active role in it, and bombed Beirut. The Israeli military claimed to be targeting militants in Lebanon, but in fact most of the people murdered were civilians, 10,000 of them. And then there is the infamous Shatila massacre, in which Sharon handed over a Palestinian refugee camp to Lebanese Christian militants, who then went into the camp killing women and children. It was in this time that the Lebanese Islamic guerilla army, Hizb Allah, translated, “Party of God,” was formed. The American mainstream had the nerve to be shocked when they bombed an American marines base; failing to consider that it was an American marines base in Lebanon during an American bombing campaign and a U.S. backed Israeli invasion, these factors obviously make the base a legitimate military target. Or does mainstream America think that the rules of war apply only to itself? I cannot help think it ungrateful when I hear a Lebanese youth say that Hizb Allah is only an extremist organization, when it was only because of Hizb Allah that Israel and the United States pulled out of Beirut and Israel eventually withdrew from south Lebanon in 2000, allowing south Lebanese families to return to their homes and freeing prisoners who were subjected to such torture as being shocked on their genitals by the Israeli army. And Hizb Allah’s activities are more than simply military ones; they also provide food and shelter to Lebanese families whose homes have been destroyed by Israeli bombing.

2. Backing and attempted coup in Syria in 1953 to overthrow an elected government.

3. The United States reportedly gave the Iraqi Ba'ath party a list of communists in Iraq to be killed.

4. In the United Nations, a resolution to return Palestinian land occupied by Israel after the war of 1963 was blocked by the United States.

5. There is the involvement with Iran on the part of the United States before the revolution of 1979. A U.S. backed takeover overthrew a democratic government and installed to power Shah Pahlavi who in his attempts to westernize Iran sent many Iranians into poverty. Those who would protest his policies were often jailed and tortured, in fact, after the revolution a film was found which was made by the CIA on how to torture women. The trouble of course did not stop after the revolution, it never does; there was the, “mistaken” shooting down of an Iranian passenger plane which killed 290 civilians. George Bush Senior had this to say about the incident, "I will never apologize for the United States of America. I don’t care what the facts are." And of course there is a continued American media campaign to make it seem like the only motivation for the 1979 Iranian Revolution was Islamic fundamentalism.

6. Following the Lokerbie plane bombing, the American navy maneuvered in waters near Libya’s coast with the aim of provocation. Libya responded by firing a missile which was probably a warning shot as it did not land near any target, but the U.S. responded by attacking Libyan patrol boats, killing 72 people. And of course there was the bombing of Libya which killed dozens of civilians and Quaddafi’s adopted daughter.

7. The people of Sudan were very proud of their pharmaceutical plant which produced half of the country’s medicine but apparently that sense of national accomplishment was not destined to last as that very plant was destroyed by American bombing, claiming that hit was a chemical weapons laboratory. The U.S. later acknowledged that there was no evidence for this claim, but the plant is still no more. Now of course Sudan will have to import more medication from American firms, isn’t it ironic how so many interventions seem to turn out in their favor?

8. The of the leader of the Palestinian Hammas movement, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, was assassinated on March 23, 2004 as he left the Islamic Association Mosque in Gaza City. Helicopters fired three missiles at him, killing him, his three bodyguards and seven civilians. Yassin was sixty six years old, blind, and was leaving the mosque in a wheelchair. Condemnation of the attack has came from many governments, except of course the United States.

The United States government and media continue to project the idea that Islamic fundamentalism is the chief cause of terrorism, while making no mention of U.S. actions that just one of which would be sufficient provocation. And of course the mainstream is all to willing to accept this idea. First of all, many Americans know of the outside world only what they in the mainstream media or read in newspapers and magazines. Even when faced with the reality of the history of America’s involvement in the Middle East many people simply ignore the facts, unable to accept that their government would take any action which was unjustified in some way.

****


When Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza are not actually being threatened by Israel’s army or bombing, they often have to deal with Israeli bulldozers destroying their homes without provocation. There are also settlers who try to enter Palestinian territory and build small villages, then act pretend the violence is unprovoked when they become the targets of militants. Some of these settlers will go so far as to suggest that Palestinians have no historical right to the land. Arabs were living on the land long before the Hebrews arrived in the area after their exodus. And when the Zionists first arrived on the ship, Exodus, in 1948 the area had a majority of Palestinians; the Zionists drove the Palestinians from their homes by deporting them, using violence and placing them into internment camps. When this information is considered it can be seen that the idea of the Palestinians not having a historical right to this territory is nothing short disinformation.

[little al]

man with small bomb=terrorist man with big bomb=statesman
'Brendan behan' writer, alchoholic,poet and former member of the IRA