Invading Afghanistan was a clear war crime, despite the tendency to term it the “good war” by so-called antiwar voices in the West. Instead of treating the 9/11 attacks as a unique crime and cooperating with the international community to arrest Bin-Laden and his acolytes, Bush launched his Global War on Terror and invaded Afghanistan on flimsy grounds despite the awareness that an invasion of the country would place millions at risk of starvation and widespread suffering. But this mattered little to a country gripped in an rage of narcissistic compassion.

As Gilbert Achcar wrote within months of 9/11:

[W]hat was so truly extraordinary about the terrorism of mass destruction that took 3,300 lives … on September 11? On the scale of carnage for which the US government is directly responsible, and has never expressed the least regret for, it was all in all a pretty ordinary massacre. (Clash of Barbarisms, 2002, p. 19)

Nothing really changed on 9/11 – the canard that so many continue to repeat – despite what was justified in its aftermath. In fact, the only thing unusual about 9/11 was that Americans experienced a tiny fraction of the terror they have exported abroad for the better part of the last century – and continue to export in places like Afghanistan.

So as the US entered the ninth year of occupation in Afghanistan yesterday, what has been accomplished apart from mass suffering? The US-led forces have not been able to expel the reactionary fundamentalist organization it tacitly supported during the mid-1990s: the Taliban. Obama has now spread the war to Pakistan, a move that will potentially push the North-Western tribal region into an alliance with the Taliban. 90% of the hundreds killed in unmanned drone attacks have been civilians, yet these attacks have increased under Obama’s watch. Meanwhile, women continue to be subjected to widespread repression and violence, outside of the militarized bubble that is Kabul. And the puppet Karzai regime is powerless and corrupt, apparently capable only of rigging elections and granting legal immunity against warlords and rapists.

This is not the “good war”. It is a continuation of an illegal and unjustified invasion.

First of all, I don’t think much of those theories, but I am bombarded with letters about this subject. It’s not only a huge industry but it’s kind of a fanatic industry. Many other people think I ought to change my priorities. But of the couple of hundred letters I’m getting every day, the flood that’s really abusive, which says, “It’s your responsibility to set this as your highest priority and to drop everything else,” is coming from the “9/11 truth” people. It’s almost a kind of religious fanaticism.

There are some questions you have to ask. One has to do with the physical evidence. There are the unexplained coincidences, personal accounts, and so on, which don’t amount to much. That’s found in any complex world event. With regard to the physical evidence, can you become a highly qualified civil and mechanical engineer and expert in the structure of buildings by spending a couple of hours on the Internet? If you can, we can get rid of the civil and mechanical engineering departments at MIT. Why go to the university? If you really believe any of this evidence, then there is no easy way to proceed. Go to specialists who can evaluate it. You may have found one physicist somewhere, though as far as I know no one has been willing to submit anything to a serious peer-reviewed journal. But that aside, you can go to the civil and mechanical engineering departments. Maybe the “9/11 truth movement” believes they’re all in on the conspiracy. If it’s that vast, we may as well forget it. These people claim that they’re afraid. There’s nothing to be afraid of. It’s one of the safest positions to take among those who are critical of power, as anyone with experience in these matters knows. If fact, it’s treated rather tolerantly by power centers.

Which takes us to another question. Why is this discussion of 9/11 treated so tolerantly? I suspect people in positions of power like it. It’s diverting enormous amounts of energy away from the real crimes of the administration, which are far more serious. Suppose they did blow up the World Trade Center? By their standards, that’s a minor crime. Increasing the threat of nuclear war and environmental disaster is a far worse crime, which might lead to the extinction of the species. Take the invasions of Iraq and Lebanon. Or look at what they’re doing to working people in the United States. We can go on and on. They’re committing real crimes, and there is very little protest about it. One of the reasons—not the only one, of course—is that so much potential activist energy is directed into 9/11 discussions. From the point of view of power centers, that’s great. We’ll give these people exposure on C-SPAN and have their books right up front at the local bookstores. A pretty tolerant reaction. We sort of say we think it’s a bad joke, but you don’t get the kind of reaction you do when you really go after hard issues.

So yes, it’s a terrible drain of energy away from much more serious problems. And I don’t think the evidence is serious. I don’t think the people who are presenting the physical evidence are even in a position to evaluate it. These are hard technical questions. What doesn’t seem to be understood is that there’s a reason scientists do experiments. They don’t just take a videotape of what’s happening out the window. The reason is that what’s happening out the window involves so many variable that you don’t understand what you’re getting in this complex mess. You can find all kinds of unexplained coincidences, apparent violations of the laws of nature. Even with controlled experiments, there are plenty of problems. You read the letters column of the science journals, you will find countless examples. So the fact that you’re finding out this happened, that happened, and so on, doesn’t mean anything.

The “Who benefits from 9/11?” argument has little force. I think in my first interview after 9/11, I made the not very brilliant prediction that every power system in the world would immediately exploit this for their own purposes. So Russia will step up its atrocities in Chechnya, Israel will in the West Bank, Indonesia will in Aceh, China in western China. In the United States, it was exploited, as we know, but also in ways that weren’t very well advertised.

Source: Noam Chomsky, What We Say Goes: Conversations on US Power in a Changing World, (Metropolitan Books: New York, 2007), pp. 35-37.

After 9/11, it could all have been different, profoundly different. And if it had, there would have been no children imprisoned without charges or release dates in our gulag in Cuba; there would have been no unmanned drones slaughtering wedding parties in the rural backlands of Afghanistan or the Iraqi desert; there would have been no soldiers returning to the US with two or three limbs missing or their heads and minds grievously damaged (there were already 320,000 traumatic brain injuries to soldiers deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan by early 2008, according to the RAND Corporation); there would not have been a next round of American deaths–4,334 in Iraq, 786 in Afghanistan to date; there would have been no trillion dollars taken from constructive projects to fatten the corporations of war; no extreme corrosion of the Bill of Rights, no usurpation of powers by the executive branch. Perhaps. (more…)

Have you contacted the widows and other family members who lost loved ones on that terrible day and asked them if they recant wondering why, for example, New York City and the Pentagon — the fucking Pentagon! — were defenseless on that morning more than a month after the would-be president was informed that Osama bin Laden was determined to attack the United States? Have you asked them if they are as disloyal, or as nuts, as Van Jones for signing that petition? Have you an answer for that and other questions on that petition, which were never discussed by the mainstream media when it piled on Jones at Beck’s behest? (more…)

The weeds are already growing rampant at the notorious “Camp X-Ray,” and President-elect Barack Obama plans to shut down the entire detention facility at Guantanamo Bay. Now the Pentagon is inviting journalists to tour the camp one last time.

One would imagine a trip to the world’s best-known and most notorious prison could be an unpleasant experience. Everyone knows the horror stories from Guantanamo: how the prisoners were chained on the flight to Cuba, and how they arrived at the camp half-frozen, their eyes blindfolded and completely disoriented. They didn’t know where they were at the time, and many of them are still there today, in the prison where the United States keeps its terror suspects.

A special group recently embarked on a trip to Guantanamo that would prove to be significantly more comfortable. The group met at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington in the early morning hours, where a North American Airlines charter flight was already waiting. The destination, with the airport code NBW, well removed from the rule of US constitutional law, is known simply as GTMO in military slang. The boarding pass was first of many amusing souvenirs of the trip. (more…)

U.S. policy is not about one individual, and no matter how much faith people place in President-elect Barack Obama, the policies he enacts will be fruit of a tree with many roots. Among them: his personal politics and views, the disastrous realities his administration will inherit, and, of course, unpredictable future crises. But the best immediate indicator of what an Obama administration might look like can be found in the people he surrounds himself with and who he appoints to his Cabinet. And, frankly, when it comes to foreign policy, it is not looking good.

Obama has a momentous opportunity to do what he repeatedly promised over the course of his campaign: bring actual change. But the more we learn about who Obama is considering for top positions in his administration, the more his inner circle resembles a staff reunion of President Bill Clinton’s White House. Although Obama brought some progressives on board early in his campaign, his foreign policy team is now dominated by the hawkish, old-guard Democrats of the 1990s. This has been particularly true since Hillary Clinton conceded defeat in the Democratic primary, freeing many of her top advisors to join Obama’s team.

"What happened to all this talk about change?" a member of the Clinton foreign policy team recently asked the Washington Post. "This isn’t lightly flavored with Clintons. This is all Clintons, all the time."
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In Sunday’s interview with “60 Minutes,” President-elect Barack Obama reaffirmed that “it is a top priority for us to stamp out al-Qaida once and for all,” adding, “and I think capturing or killing bin Laden is a critical aspect of stamping out al-Qaida.” Obama argued that the Saudi terrorist “is not just a symbol” but is rather “the operational leader” of the organization, which he said is still planning attacks against U.S. targets.

Obama’s quiet seriousness of purpose is a welcome contrast with George W. Bush’s swaggering pronouncements about bin Laden being “wanted dead or alive,” or his darkly comic standard answer to the question of why bin Laden has not yet been caught. “He’s hiding,” Bush likes to say.

And for those who believe Bush, obsessed with Iraq, has either not tried very hard or has secretly avoided capturing bin Laden, Obama’s words are probably reassuring. Now American attention will return to the real author of 9/11, and a more determined effort might yield fruit. But the question is whether the new president should really focus his attention on bin Laden, and spend his political capital in a renewed attempt to bring him to justice. There are many reasons why a stepped-up and publicized pursuit of bin Laden may prove costly to Barack Obama.

The first is the danger of failing, just like his predecessor. After the bravado of the early post-9/11 period, and vows to catch his quarry, Bush came up empty. An enemy who struck at the beginning of his first term is still at loose in the Pakistani-Afghan borderlands at the end of his second. (more…)

If the presidential debate Friday night told us anything, it was that whichever of these candidates is elected, we can expect more wars, or at least more conflicts that put U.S. forces or citizens in danger for dubious reasons. Neither John McCain nor Barack Obama came close to questioning the "bipartisan" consensus on U.S. foreign policy, that the U.S. should be the prime mover and shaker in the world at large. They differ, and in some ways that are fairly important, on details. But on the central question of whether it is the United States’ job to go out there and fix the world, there was no disagreement.

To be sure, taking candidates at their word during a debate is not necessarily advisable for one who would be so foolish as to try to predict what they will do once in office. Politicians as a breed are not noted for being especially candid on the campaign trail, of course. Furthermore, every president faces unexpected foreign-policy challenges (Truman didn’t expect Korea, Carter didn’t expect Iran, Dubya didn’t expect 9/11, etc.). Still, the Bushlet has left some open sores out there in the rest of the world. So the next president is likely to have to deal with winding down the war in Iraq and figuring out what to do in Afghanistan and Pakistan, which will require reaching some kind of accommodation with Iran. Neither candidate seems to realize this, so they competed to see who could say the most childishly nasty things.

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A letter recently appeared in the Washington Post that got me thinking about John Walker Lindh again. You remember him… The so-called “American Taliban” sentenced to 20 years in prison for “aiding the Taliban”. In reality, Lindh was more likely likely an unwitting victim of an emotionally fragile post-9/11 United States as well as a guinea pig for U.S. torture policy elsewhere.

As it turns out, the FBI allowed Lindh to be abused in various ways, perhaps insignificant compared to incidents in Iraq and Guantánamo, but abuses nonetheless. In retrospect, the revelation that Lindh was subject to abuse should not be a surprise. In the foamy-mouthed ideological environment of Bush’s “War on Terror”, Lindh was just another tool to forward the administration’s propaganda machine. (more…)