When Captain America Throws His Mighty Shield: The War on Terror is the War on You

So much has already been written about 911 & the War on Terror (WoT) that my small contribution seems a little laughable. Future historians will write much more I’m sure. I have the luck of being able to review my reactions to 911 & the beginning of the WoT by re-reading forums posts and emails. From a personal perspective, the events of 911 almost killed a friend and his boyfriend. The friend travels past the WTC on Mondays & Wednesday - he had the luck (for him) that the planes hit Tuesday. His boyfriend drove under the WTC daily around 9.00am - but on Tuesday he was ill and couldn’t make work. Another friend who lives closed to the ruins has experienced terrible rage, fear, anxiety, as well as help and sympathy from strangers, a sense of camaraderie and a re-appreciation of the important things in life - all due to the disaster. There are lots of other stories like these.

911 and historical issues

But 911 was more than a disaster for NYC. 911 was the catalyst for the WoT. How to approach this complex subject? In a historical context, the WoT is part of an increase in tensions between Islam and modernity, or East and West respectively. The tensions are due to two major factors - 1. Middle Eastern countries have been slower to modernize. “The modern spirit had two main characteristics. The first of these was independence. Modernization proceeded by declarations of independence on all fronts: social, political, intellectual, as scientists, for example, demanded the freedom to pursue their insights, despite the disapproval of the established churches. Freedom became a necessary hallmark of the modern state. The second mark of the new society was innovation: western people were constantly breaking new ground and creating something fresh; they institutionalized change in a way that had been quite impossible in a preindustrial civilization. This process of modernization took a long time; modern society did not come fully into its own until the 19th century. Like any major social change, the period of transition was traumatic and often violent. Today we are witnessing similar upheaval in developing countries, including those in the Islamic world, that are making their own painful journey to modernity. In the Middle East, for example, we see constant political upheaval.”

This upheaval is not just due to modern changes though, it is exacerbated by the historical problems caused by the European invasion of the Middle East in the 19th century. “The new economies of western Europe needed a constantly expanding market for the goods that funded their cultural enterprises. Once the home countries were saturated, new markets were sought abroad. Between 1830 and 1915, the European powers occupied Algeria, Aden, Tunisia, Egypt, the Sudan, Libya and Morocco - all Muslim countries. These new "colonies" provided raw materials for export, which were fed into European industry. In return, they received cheap manufactured goods, which naturally destroyed local industry. The colony also had to be modernized and brought into the western system, so some of the "natives" had to acquire a degree of familiarity with the modern ethos. After the collapse of the Ottoman empire during the first world war, Britain and France set up mandates and protectorates in its former provinces, in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Palestine This new impotence was extremely disturbing for the Muslim countries. Until this point, Islam had been a religion of success.” The Middle East has yet to fully modernize and is going through the political actions and reactions of those wanting to modernize and those who don’t.

The 2nd major factor in tension is Israel. “The creation of the state of Israel, the chief ally of the United States in the Middle East, has become a symbol of Muslim impotence before the western powers, which seemed to feel no qualm about the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who lost their homeland and either went into exile or lived under Israeli occupation. Rightly or wrongly, America's strong support for Israel is seen as proof that as far as the United States is concerned, Muslims are of no importance and simply do not count. In their frustration, many have turned to Islam. The secularist and nationalist ideologies, which they had imported from the west, seemed to have failed them, and by the late 1960s, Muslims throughout the Islamic world had begun to develop what we call fundamentalist movements.”
(LINK - http://www.guardian.co.uk/waronterror/story/0,1361,568512,00.html).

Recent history

Narrowing the focus of this historical perspective we can begin to ask specific questions: 1. Who is the war against? 2. What are the war’s effects?
1. The enemy in this war is terrorists. Not just OBL & al-Qaida, but all terrorists. What a terrorist is, is a matter for debate. Broad and fluid definitions have allowed various countries to brand who they wish as terrorists (LINK- http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4138438,00.html). In the UK, the Terrorist Act introduces the criminal offence of "incitement" - an offence which could catch, for example, anyone calling for the overthrow of undemocratic regimes abroad. It would have caught Nelson Mandela and other ANC leaders who supported armed struggle against the apartheid regime in South Africa. The Act gives police stop and search powers on the basis of "expediency" and of "suspicion", not of committing any offence, but of being connected, or potentially connected, to the bill's vague description of "terrorism". Under the Act it is a criminal offence to possess any "article" or "information", including photographs, in circumstances which give rise to a "reasonable suspicion" they would be used for "terrorist" purposes - a clause which has serious implications, not least for journalists. The Act reverses the burden of proof - it will be up to the accused to prove their innocence, in other words, to prove a negative. That is not all. The definition of terrorism in the bill includes "the use or threat, for the purpose of advancing a political, religious, or ideological cause, of action which involves serious violence against any person or property". This could embrace not only armed extremists but also environmental activists attacking GM crops. The US has an equally malleable “definition” of terrorist.

Indeed, this is not a “War on Terror”, but a “war against certain terrorists as we choose to define them”, just as the “War on Drugs” was just a “war against some drugs we don‘t like”. The UK and USA have both ignored or supported terrorists in recent history, despite Bush announcing "If any government sponsors the outlaws and killers of innocents," on the day he began bombing Afghanistan. He continued: "they have become outlaws and murderers themselves. And they will take that lonely path at their own peril." I'm glad he said "any government", as there's one which, though it has yet to be identified as a sponsor of terrorism, requires his urgent attention. For the past 55 years the US “has been running a terrorist training camp... called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, or Whisc (previously known as the School of the Americas). It is based in Fort Benning, Georgia, and it is funded by Mr Bush's government.” An example of the camps activities: “In 1993, the United Nations truth commission on El Salvador named the army officers who had committed the worst atrocities of the civil war. Two-thirds of them had been trained at the School of the Americas. Among them were Roberto D'Aubuisson, the leader of El Salvador's death squads; the men who killed Archbishop Oscar Romero; and 19 of the 26 soldiers who murdered the Jesuit priests in 1989. In Chile, the school's graduates ran both Augusto Pinochet's secret police and his three principal concentration camps. One of them helped to murder Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffit in Washington DC in 1976.”
(LINK- http://www.guardian.co.uk/waronterror/story/0,1361,583254,00.html). Both The US & UK were complicit in the assassination of up to a million dissidents by the Suharto dictatorship in Indonesia in the 1960s. The US government trained deadly Contra terrorists in Nicaragua in the 1980s resulting in up to 50,000 deaths and the overthrow of a democratically elected government (LINK - http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,589011,00.html). Britain and America ignored the Indonesian genocide of 200,000 East Timorese in the 1970s and 80s, while selling arms to the Indonesian dictatorship. NATO systematically tore up international law in 1999 in bombing civilian targets in Yugoslavia, which left 1,500 civilians dead. The US and UK governments are waging a modern form of siege warfare against Iraq, in which economic sanctions supposedly meant to hurt Saddam Hussain have killed up to a million civilians, half of them children. (LINK - http://www.greenparty.org.uk/news/2001/09/uturn.html). Further evidence of the US’s belligerence is provided by the fact that it has been at war every year since World War 2. Here is a list of the countries that America has been at war with - and bombed - since the second world war: China (1945-46, 1950-53), Korea (1950-53), Guatemala (1954, 1967-69), Indonesia (1958), Cuba (1959-60), the Belgian Congo (1964), Peru (1965), Laos (1964-73), Vietnam (1961-73), Cambodia (1969-70), Grenada (1983), Libya (1986), El Salvador (1980s), Nicaragua (1980s), Panama (1989), Iraq (1991-99), Bosnia (1995), Sudan (1998), Yugoslavia (1999). And now Afghanistan. (LINK - http://www.guardian.co.uk/waronterror/story/0,1361,579196,00.html)

So as it stands, this is not a war undertaken to liberate the world and defend freedom. This is not a war undertaken by two virtuous and just countries. This is a war undertaken by hypocritical countries, that define terrorist as they see fit, and who support and maintain violence in other countries, violence which most people agree has the appearance of terrorism. As it stands, the WoT is simply a “War on those who don’t agree with us”. 911 is just an excuse to coin a phrase and carry on business as normal - aggression against countries that don’t obey the USA.

All that said, 911 did divert the US’s attention to Afghanistan. Though they were happy to support the Mujahideen in the past (LINK http://globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO109C.html) and ignore the crimes of the Taliban and Northern Alliance (LINK - http://www.eurasianet.org/departments/rights/articles/eav100301.shtml), the US did succeed in overthrowing an oppressive and hateful regime. This takes us to our next question:

2. What are the war‘s effects?

The Taliban are now mainly defeated. Though there are fears that they may regroup (LINK - http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia_china/story.jsp?story=119313) they seem scattered. And a good thing too. As we well know the Taliban were a cruel and oppressive regime which needed to be removed. Better yet, they should have never existed. But who has replaced them? The shaky interim government lead by Hamid Karzai is not receiving the support he need. (LINK -http://www.stuff.co.nz/inl/index/0,1008,1098961a12,FF.html) Will history repeat itself? Hopefully, the West won’t ignore Afghanistan again. The rebuilding of Afghanistan will take a long time. It is still unclear how this war has affected this process.

As far as America’s war aims go, none have been achieved. OBL is missing. He could be dead in a cave or in hiding. In either way, the US has no clearly defeated him. That said, it is hoped his image will be tarnished and his absent interpreted as cowardice. Unfortunately, OBL is very popular. That he stood defiant against the hated US will still give him great kudos. Al-Qaida are similarly vanished. Though plenty of prisoners languish in Camp X-Ray, the other cells world wide have a low profile. This provides the US with further reason to carry out their bogus and so called War on Terror.

One of the major effects of the War on Terror is the increasing loss of rights throughout the world. “Governments may be using the war against terror in Afghanistan as an excuse to lower their own standards on civil liberties, Human Rights Watch said. The group, which monitors human rights abuses around the world, issued the warning in its 2002 annual report. In central Europe and central Asia, it said: "In much the same way as the Cold War once distorted the human rights agenda, the prospects for tackling the region's persistent and newly emerging human rights problems seemed suddenly to dim in light of the competing and overriding anti-terrorism imperative".” “LINK - http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=114689). There are plenty of examples in the US & UK alone. In the same way the UK is loosely defining terrorism, so too the US. The US has updated <a href ="http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4260129,00.html"target="_new" >terrorism laws. Formerly terrorism was defined as "any use or threat of use of a firearm other than for mere personal monetary gain" (which thus excluded armed robbery). Now any weapon can be involved, which means a foreigner could be detained without trial for pulling out a penknife. Professor David Cole of the University of Georgetown Law Center said: "My concern is that the US has historically over-reacted in times of fear, indulging in guilt by association and giving government the power to act against individuals without procedures necessary to distinguish the guilty from the innocent."


Precedents include not only the long-discredited round-up of Japanese-born Americans after Pearl Harbor and the anti-communist excesses of the McCarthy era in the 1950s but the lesser-known Red Scare roundup of 1920. There is also the response to the Oklahoma City bomb of 1995 which first widened the definition of aiding terrorism so that, according to Prof Cole, anyone sending a textbook to a West Bank school which turns out to be run by Hamas could face a 10-year jail sentence. If apartheid still existed, supporters of the African National Congress would have been equally vulnerable.

Most citizens are docile in their submission to authority, and neither Congress nor the public has any taste for rebellion at present. But the lesson of history is that the consequences of ill-considered legislation usually outlast the danger - however extreme - it is designed to combat. Once lost, these freedoms will be impossible to restore. (LINK - http://www.guardian.co.uk/ukresponse/story/0,11017,616853,00.html) The US & UK instituted regimes that remove the rights of anyone whom the security authorities merely suspect of aiding and abetting terrorism, a word both of them are prepared to define widely remember. “Ashcroft has already arrested 1,200 people, though that number is unofficial since their names are nowhere collectively available. Blunkett is pushing through parliament a power of detention without trial, though in Britain the list of detainees will probably not be secret. These ministers, secondly, share a similar attitude to critics. Ashcroft implied last week that critics were traitors to US interests. "Your tactics only aid terrorists," was his brutal verdict. Criticism, he told the Senate, "gives ammunition to America's enemies and pause to America's friends". For his part, Blunkett charged anyone who declined to let his anti-terrorism bill go through with complicity in future terrorist attacks.”

All of this is taking place in an atmosphere of paranoia where UK & especially US citizens are constantly mobilized for action. The US populace has been kept taunt and afraid by constant warnings to “keep watch”. This mass paranoia born of a misguided patriotism has resulted in many rights abuses and injustices. On November 9, Muller and his colleague Andrew Mandell went to pick up stamps at the Chicago post office they regularly visit. They were paying with cash. "We needed 4,000 stamps for a mailing we were doing, and I asked for ones not with the American flag on them." "No one said anything to us for about twenty minutes, and then two cops came in and asked for our IDs. They asked if we had any outstanding warrants. They ran a check on us. They asked us why we had asked for stamps without American flags on them. Mandell got his stamps the next day, but he also was asked to meet with a federal postal inspector for more than a half-hour. (LINK - http://www.progressive.org/webex/wxmc120801.html). There are other, more serious, like Katie Sierra who was suspended from Sissonville high school in Charleston for founding an anarchy club, and wearing a T-shirt on which she had written "Against Bush, Against Bin Laden" and "When I saw the dead and dying Afghani children on TV, I felt a newly recovered sense of national security. God bless America." There are others too, like AJ Brown, a 19-year-old woman studying at Durham Tech, North Carolina, answered the door to three security agents. They had been informed, they told her, that she was in possession of "anti-American material". Someone had seen a poster on her wall, campaigning against George Bush's use of the death penalty. They asked her whether she also possessed pro-Taliban propaganda.

On October 10, 22-year-old Neil Godfrey was banned from boarding a plane traveling from Philadelphia to Phoenix because he was carrying a novel by the anarchist writer Edward Abbey. At the beginning of November, Nancy Oden, an anti-war activist on her way to a conference, was surrounded at Bangor airport in Maine by soldiers with automatic weapons and forbidden to fly on the grounds that she was a "security risk".
(LINK - http://www.guardian.co.uk/ukresponse/story/0,11017,620413,00.html)

This atmosphere of fear and repression and the laws that support them means that the US is suppressing its own freedom of speech. “There is not so much an absence of dissent as an almost total prohibition on questioning of the war. The few who do stick their heads above the parapet invariably belong to the radical left and are shouted down with unprecedented ferocity. Witness the treatment of Susan Sontag when she challenged the war's prosecution in an article for The New Yorker. It says something about the current state of affairs when a columnist on the conservative Washington Times worries about the absence of serious debate on the war and suggests that the American media may be giving George Bush a blank check for the creation of powerful central government. There exists instead a vituperative "jock" journalism that mocks concerns about human rights and acts as a cheerleader for the White House. America has been down this road before. The existential threat posed by the rebellion of the Confederacy in 1860 enabled Abraham Lincoln to suspend habeas corpus; the Second World War saw the internment of Japanese Americans, under the most liberal president in the nation's history; and the Cold War era unleashed the witch-hunts of McCarthyism. The First Amendment may guarantee freedom of speech, but it is no protection against an atmosphere that makes traitors of the independent-minded. As Thomas Jefferson was only too aware when the Bill of Rights was drafted, the will of the majority must be subjected to checks and balances if an elective dictatorship is to be avoided.” (LINK- http://argument.independent.co.uk/regular_columnists/fergal_keane/story.jsp?story=115249).

Riding on the back of this draconian laws are plans to make ID cards compulsory to access schools, hospitals & other public services in the UK. (LINK - http://www.observer.co.uk/politics/story/0,6903,560736,00.html). Added to further invasions like face-recognition software coupled with massive CCTV presence, the possible selling of genetic information to private companies and the increasing trend towards voyeuristic entertainment like the puerile Big Brother, privacy & other civil rights in the UK are endangered as never before.

As a terrorist could be a peaceful protestor, and as the citizens of the West are coming under the heal of repressive laws, one can ask who is this war really against? The answer is probably that the real enemy of the State is the disobedient citizen who does not follow his government blindly into war and oppression. We - the disobedient and the critical - are the Terror.

Has America avenged itself? Many wars are waged for this reason. What revenge means for individual Americans will differ, but there has certainly been catharsis during the war. This is the most clear achievement of the WoT - death suffering & continued misery. But it this has come at the cost of the ordinary Afghans, “who had nothing whatever to do with, the atrocities, didn't elect the Taliban theocrats who ruled over them and had no say in the decision to give house room to Bin Laden and his friends. Now, for the first time, a systematic independent study has been carried out into civilian casualties in Afghanistan by Marc Herold, a US economics professor at the University of New Hampshire. Based on corroborated reports from aid agencies, the UN, eyewitnesses, TV stations, newspapers and news agencies around the world, Herold estimates that at least 3,767 civilians were killed by US bombs between October 7 and December 10. That is an average of 62 innocent deaths a day - and an even higher figure than the 3,234 now thought to have been killed in New York and Washington on September 11.” (LINK - http://www.guardian.co.uk/afghanistan/story/0,1284,622000,00.html). It seems callous to measure the dead in NYC against the dead in Afghanistan. But isn’t war a matter of an eye for an eye? Evening the odds? Paying back in kind? What these figures fail to take into account are the Afghan dead who will die of starvation, disease and in the continuing civil disruption and violence to come (LINK- http://www.peoplesgeography.org/Impending%20starvation%20in%20Afghanistan.htm). They also fail to take into account the American dead who may well die from leukemia, cancer or the other poisons effects of the cloud of pollution that the WTC collapse kicked up (LINK http://www.immuneweb.org/911/news/sept01.html). And again, the mental distress to survivors of the disasters in both countries cannot be accounted for.

Finally, the WoT has managed to achieve an increase in Middle Eastern tension. (LINK - http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:TKeN1M7UcGcC:www.unc.edu/depts/pfn/pfnwar. pdf+War+on+Terror+increase+middle+eastern+tension&hl=en). As the WoT is still to be still raging, it is likely that there will be more terror, more fear and more death in the middle East, and perhaps also in the US and the rest of the West too. Once again, war is shown to be a vicious circle which creates more war and death. War is shown to not only oppress the supposed enemy, but also ones own nation. It is paradoxical to claim that one can wage war against terror. “War is terror, magnified a thousand times.”

Recently, the US has quietly extended its "war on terrorism" to include weapons of mass destruction. One of the war's new aims, Mr Bush said in his state of the union speech, is "to prevent regimes that sponsor terror from threatening America or our friends and allies with weapons of mass destruction".
(LINK - http://www.guardian.co.uk/elsewhere/journalist/story/0,7792,648683,00.html). This re-defining of the wars aims exposes the real agenda - American imperialism disguised as pre-emptive defense against countries with which all options have not yet been exhausted. “Take this war to its logical conclusion and we'll soon be in the business of installing authoritarian regimes in all the fragile countries around the world, and propping them up endlessly with dollars and weaponry in order to preserve our liberty in the west.”

 

 

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