September 12,12:35 p.m.
Already, certain Washington hands and select media mouthpieces were playing an alarming blame game, seeking to channel public anger into their long-favored favored projects. On ABC, former Secretary of State James Baker blamed the whole thing on the Church Committee -- the U.S. Senate inquiry that 20 years ago exposed the long history of CIA manipulation of foreign governments and subsidizing of torture. "In terms of intelligence, we unilaterally disarmed," Baker insisted, declaring it time return for a return to the days of unaccountable "dirty business."
He seems to have forgotten just how deeply American embroilment in dirty business -- coups, assassinations, military regimes -- contributed to hatred of the U.S.
Bruce Shapiro, excerpted from "Terrorists are made, not born," at
Salon.com.
10:01 a.m.
My suggestions for on-going discussion and
coverage of the attacks yesterday are: http://www.commondreams.org and
http://www.alternet.org.
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The Reagan/Bush administrations achieved a double goal through
invoking the label "terrorist." On the one hand, they were able to deny
the context (and usual U.S. involvement) behind politicaly conflict,
and, on the other, they managed to use the fear generated through
sensationalism to justify their agenda of political and military
repression wherever they deemed it necessary. As a result, hundreds of
thousands of people in Latin America, the Middle East, Asia, and Africa
have been dispossessed, tortured, and murdered.
Anne Goldson, an independent video maker and producer of
Counterterrorism, a series originally made for PBS, in an interview in
Violent Persuasions: The Politics and Imagery of
Terrorism.
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Nothing does, nothing can, justify the brutal terror attack that may
have killed thousands of innocent civilians. It is a crime against
humanity of the highest order, and the sympathies of all right-thinking
people must be with the families of the victims.
But we must understand what led to it, and draw the right lessons
from it, or as Santayana suggested, we may be condemned to relive it.
Let us not pretend that this was the only harvest in history that was
never sown.
The main practitioner of attacks that either deliberately target
civilians or are so indiscriminate that it makes no difference, is no
shadowy Middle Eastern terrorist, but our own government.
Where was the justified rage of commentators, analysts, and talking
heads when the United States attacked civilians on a massive scale
during the Gulf War, even referring to Basra, a city of 800,000, as a
"military target." Where was it when they deliberately destroyed the
water treatment systems of the country, and then spent ten years
carefully rationing the chlorine needed to treat the water and the
medicines that could be used to fight an explosion of water-borne
disease, while over 1 million Iraqi civilians died?
Where was it when the U.S. invaded Panama, in blatant violation of
international law, shelled a lower-class civilian neighborhood of Panama
City for hours, broadcasting commands for the people to surrender in
English, not Spanish, and then bulldozed most of the estimated four
thousand (mostly civilian) dead into unmarked mass graves?
Or during Guatemala's genocidal dirty war against the indigenous
Mayan population, inaugurated after a CIA-sponsored military coup in
1954, and supported by the United States through the 1980's, which
killed a quarter of a million people? When the United States financed an
army of thugs to rape, torture, and murder innocent peasants in
Nicaragua whose only crime was that they wanted to control their own
lives? When NATO destroyed the civilian infrastructure of Serbia? When,
on hundreds of different occasions since December 1998, U.S. planes
dropped bombs on Iraq?
None of these victimizations of innocent people in other countries by
our government justifies the victimization of innocent Americans by any
foreign agency (and we must remember that as yet there is no conclusive
evidence about who committed these atrocities). But they do help to
explain the anger many people feel against the United States, and the
symbols of its power.
Everybody (so it seems) is beating the drums of war, in a way we have
not seen in this country since the much-referred-to attack on Pearl
Harbor. George W. Bush, in his speech to the nation yesterday, said "We
will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these
attacks and those who harbor them," suggesting that retaliation will not
only be swift and severe but indiscriminate, that it will involve
targeting the innocent citizens of the country from which the
perpetrators happened to plan this attack.
Unfortunately, it seems that most Americans are choosing to learn the
wrong lessons from this. Instead of learning that the imperial fantasies
of being able to destroy entire countries without incurring a single
American casualty, of being able to antagonize half the world and
somehow assure complete safety by intelligence operations have crumbled
when brought into contact with reality, they have decided that what we
really need is more of a failed and completely untenable policy.
Excerpted from "The War Comes Home," by
Rahul Mahajan. For the rest of this editorial, visit http://www.commondreams.org.