L’il King John and the attack of the Straw Men

Straw men, everywhere you look — and somebody behind the curtain pulling the strings … we would assume it’s Rove, but he’s known for a pretty flawless script… and what the Boyz have been spouting the last few days … well … it hits your ear like nails on a chalk board. The Dubby proudly defends his secret CIA black sites and torture program by focusing on Abu Zubaydah — OBVIOUSLY he will be vindicated for breaking the law and shredding the Constitution when the world learns how Evil Evil Evil Zubaydah is … but the word is, this little Abu is a lot like poor deluded Moussaoui … a quart low to start with; after the thumb screws, you have to wonder what helpful tidbit could be wrung from that bruised brain.

Then yesterday on Meet the Press, Uncle Dick went on and on about Zarqawi … how he was Saddam’s Al Qaeda connection [even though he wasn't AQ then, and Saddam wanted no part of AQ anyhow] and how the illusive Mr. Z had his fingers in the Evil Doer’s Plot from start to finish. Now, that’s Very Interesting, since he did not come to our attention until very late in the game [and gosh! isn't it helpful that he's DEAD and can't put out a disclaimer,] but now he’s the epitome of Evil Doer and an Osama henchman from the git-go? Yes, you’d better believe it, America — it’s been intoned in those matter-of-fact, I-know-best authoritarian gutturals of our avuncular VP.

Are they running out of buzz words? Confused in their story line? Are they hoping that names we recognize will trip us off like security buzzers … much as the gentle and vague voters in Florida ended up voting for whack-job Katherine Harris just because they’d heard her name before and didn’t know the other candidates?

There’s a deluded quality about all this … even worse than usual. The CIA, as the first piece tells us, evidently thinks so too. There’s squirming going on … and for once, it isn’t us!

Last piece, David Sirota gives us examples of the Straw Man tactic: “They” did it. Which they? Why the “Us/THEM” they, of course!

Jude

Worried CIA Officers Buy Legal Insurance
Plans Fund Defense In Anti-Terror Cases
R. Jeffrey Smith
Monday, September 11, 2006
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/10/AR2006091001286_pf.html

CIA counterterrorism officers have signed up in growing numbers for a government-reimbursed, private insurance plan that would pay their civil judgments and legal expenses if they are sued or charged with criminal wrongdoing, according to current and former intelligence officials and others with knowledge of the program.

The new enrollments reflect heightened anxiety at the CIA that officers may be vulnerable to accusations they were involved in abuse, torture, human rights violations and other misconduct, including wrongdoing related to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. They worry that they will not have Justice Department representation in court or congressional inquiries, the officials said.

The anxieties stem partly from public controversy about a system of secret CIA prisons in which detainees were subjected to harsh interrogation methods, including temperature extremes and simulated drowning. The White House contends the methods were legal, but some CIA officers have worried privately that they may have violated international law or domestic criminal statutes.

Details of the rough interrogations could come to light if trials are held for any of the approximately 100 detainees who were held in the prisons. President Bush announced last week that he had transferred the last 14 detainees in the facilities to the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and had submitted a proposal to Congress for the rules under which the administration would like the suspects to be tried.

Terrorism suspects’ defense attorneys are expected to argue that admissions made by their clients were illegally coerced as the result of policies set in Washington.

Justice Department political appointees have strongly backed the CIA interrogations. But “there are a lot of people who think that subpoenas could be coming” from Congress after the November elections or from federal prosecutors if Democrats capture the White House in 2008, said a retired senior intelligence officer who remains in contact with former colleagues in the agency’s Directorate of Operations, which ran the secret prisons.

“People are worried about a pendulum swing” that could lead to accusations of wrongdoing, said another former CIA officer.

The insurance policies were bought from Arlington-based Wright and Co., a subsidiary of the private Special Agents Mutual Benefit Association created by former FBI officials. The CIA has encouraged many of its officers to take out the insurance, current and former intelligence officials said, but no one interviewed would reveal precisely how many have bought policies.

As part of the administration’s efforts to protect intelligence officers from liability, Bush last week called for Congress to approve legislation drafted by the White House that would exempt CIA officers and other federal civilian officials from prosecution for humiliating and degrading terrorism suspects in U.S. custody. Its wording would keep prosecutors or courts from considering a wider definition of actions that constitute torture.

Bush also asked Congress to bar federal courts from considering lawsuits by detainees who were in CIA or military custody that allege violations of international treaties and laws governing treatment of detainees.

The proposals have won mixed reviews in the Senate, where they are generally opposed by Democrats and a group of dissident Republicans. The proposals were deliberately omitted, for example, from competing legislation circulated last week by Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John W. Warner (R-Va.), Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.).

Several former intelligence officials who said CIA officers do not need insurance because they can rely on the government to defend their lawful actions depicted the growing number of policies as a barometer of the uncertainty officers have of the legality of their work.

A recently retired CIA officer who said he had not bought insurance contended that “if an individual does get sued in the course of their official duties, then you get the biggest law firm in the world to step in” — the Justice Department. Justice regulations allow defending federal workers if the conduct is within the scope of an employee’s job and doing so is in the government’s “interest.”

The insurance, costing about $300 a year, would pay as much as $200,000 toward legal expenses and $1 million in civil judgments. Since the late 1990s, the CIA’s senior managers have been eligible for reimbursement of half the insurance premium.

In December 2001, with congressional authorization, the CIA expanded the reimbursements to 100 percent for CIA counterterrorism officers. That was about the time J. Cofer Black, then the CIA’s counterterrorism chief, told Bush that “the gloves come off” and promised “heads on spikes” in the counterterrorism effort.

“Why would [CIA officers] take any risks in their professional duties if the government was unwilling to cover the cost of their liability?” asked Rep. Rob Simmons (R-Conn.), a former CIA officer, during congressional debate that year.

Although suing federal officials for their actions is not easy, it is possible; the Supreme Court left the door ajar in two rulings. It ruled in 1971 that six narcotics agents could be sued for monetary damages arising from a warrantless search. Eleven years later, it held that government officials should be immune from civil liability only if their conduct does not violate clear statutory or constitutional rights that should be known by “a reasonable person.”

William L. Bransford, a senior partner at the law firm that defends people who take out the insurance, said he is unaware of any recent increase in claims. But agency officials said that interest has been stoked over the years by the $2 million legal bill incurred by CIA officer Clair George before his 1992 conviction for lying to Congress about the Iran-contra arms sales; by the Justice Department’s lengthy investigation of CIA officers for allegedly lying to Congress about the agency’s role in shooting down a civilian aircraft in 2001 in Peru; and by other events.

One former intelligence official said CIA officers have recently expressed concern that lawsuits will erupt if details of the agency’s internal probe of wrongdoing related to the September 2001 attacks become public.

In his report, CIA Inspector General John L. Helgerson recommended that the agency convene an accountability board to examine the actions of senior officials. But last October, then-CIA director Porter J. Goss rejected the advice and decided the report should remain secret.

CIA spokesman Mark Mansfield said Friday that “it’s fair to say that more employees have chosen to get this insurance, including those who work in counterterrorism.” He said the agency’s office of general counsel “advises employees to consider it” and called it a “prudent measure, in case of legal claims.” But he said more employees at other federal agencies are also enrolling.

CIA employees outside the counterterrorism field who are eligible for reimbursement include the agency’s supervisors, attorneys, equal-opportunity- employment counselors, auditors, polygraph examiners, security adjudicators, grievance officers, inspectors general and internal investigators, he said. One in 10 eligible employees sought reimbursement last year, Mansfield said, adding that the fraction from previous years and a breakdown on those in the counterterrorism field were not immediately available.

Brian Lewis, president of Wright and Co., confirmed that the number of new policies “has gone up, especially in the last two years.” But he said that the company lumped CIA officers with Justice Department employees who also have the insurance and that he did not have exact numbers for the CIA.

Robert M. McNamara Jr., the CIA’s general counsel from 1997 to November 2001, said he advised station chiefs to buy the insurance. “The problem is that we are the victims of shifting winds here,” McNamara said he told the officers. “I can’t sit here and tell you in all cases that I will be able to defend you.”

However, McNamara’s predecessor as CIA general counsel, Jeffrey H. Smith, said: “I’m deeply troubled that CIA officers have to buy insurance. . . . There should be clear rules about what the officers can and can’t do. The fault here is with more senior people who authorized interrogation techniques that amount to torture” and should now be liable, instead of “the officers who carried it out.” ++

Interrogation Methods Rejected by Military Win Bush’s Support
Adam Liptak
Friday, September 8, 2006 by the New York Times
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0908-10.htm

Many of the harsh interrogation techniques repudiated by the Pentagon on Wednesday would be made lawful by legislation put forward the same day by the Bush administration. And the courts would be forbidden from intervening.

The proposal is in the last 10 pages of an 86-page bill devoted mostly to military commissions, and it is a tangled mix of cross-references and pregnant omissions.

But legal experts say it adds up to an apparently unique interpretation of the Geneva Conventions, one that could allow C.I.A. operatives and others to use many of the very techniques disavowed by the Pentagon, including stress positions, sleep deprivation and extreme temperatures.

“It’s a Jekyll and Hyde routine,” Martin S. Lederman, who teaches constitutional law at Georgetown University, said of the administration’s dual approaches.

In effect, the administration is proposing to write into law a two-track system that has existed as a practical matter for some time.

So-called high-value detainees held by the C.I.A. have been subjected to tough interrogation in secret prisons around the world.

More run-of-the-mill prisoners held by the Defense Department have, for the most part, faced milder questioning, although human rights groups say there have been widespread abuses.

The new bill would continue to give the C.I.A. the substantial freedom it has long enjoyed, while the revisions to the Army Field Manual announced Wednesday would further restrict military interrogators.

The legislation would leave open the possibility that the military could revise its own standards to allow the harsher techniques.

John C. Yoo, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and a former Justice Department official who helped develop the administration’s early legal response to the terrorist threat, said the bill would provide people on the front lines with important tools.

“When you’re fighting a new kind of war against an enemy we haven’t faced before,” Professor Yoo said, “our system needs to give flexibility to people to respond to those challenges.”

In June, in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the Supreme Court ruled that a provision of the Geneva Conventions concerning the humane treatment of prisoners applied to all aspects of the conflict with Al Qaeda. The new bill would keep the courts from that kind of meddling, Professor Yoo said.

“There is a rejection of what the court did in Hamdan,” he said, “which is to try to judicially enforce the Geneva Conventions, which no court had ever tried to do before.”

Indeed, the proposed legislation takes pains to try to ensure that the Supreme Court will not have a second bite at the apple. “The act makes clear,” it says in its introductory findings, “that the Geneva Conventions are not a source of judicially enforceable individual rights.”

Though lawsuits will almost certainly be filed challenging the bill should it become law, most legal experts said Congress probably had the power to restrict the courts’ jurisdiction in this way.

The proposed legislation would provide retroactive immunity from prosecution to government agents who used harsh methods after the Sept. 11 attacks. And, as President Bush suggested on Wednesday, it would ensure that those techniques remain lawful.

“As more high-ranking terrorists are captured, the need to obtain intelligence from them will remain critical,” Mr. Bush said. “And having a C.I.A. program for questioning terrorists will continue to be crucial to getting life-saving information.”

Mr. Bush said he had never authorized torture but indicated that aggressive interrogation techniques short of torture remained important tools in the administration’s efforts to combat terrorism.

“I cannot describe the specific methods used — I think you understand why,” he said. “If I did, it would help the terrorists learn how to resist questioning, and to keep information from us that we need to prevent new attacks on our country. But I can say the procedures were tough, and they were safe and lawful and necessary.”

A senior intelligence official said that the new legislation, if enacted, would make it clear that the techniques used by the C.I.A. on senior Qaeda members who had been held abroad in secret sites would not be prohibited and that interrogators who engaged in those practices both in the past and in the future would not face prosecution.

The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, would not discuss the techniques the agency had used or was prepared to use.

Other senior administration officials, all of whom declined to speak on the record, said there was no intention to undercut the interrogation rules in the new Army Field Manual, which does not include some of the most extreme techniques used on some suspected terrorists in American custody.

The intent of the legislation, they said, is to prevent the prosecution of interrogators under amendments to the War Crimes Act that were passed in the 1990’s.

Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions bars, among other things, “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment.” The administration says that language is too vague.

That is nonsense, said Harold Hongju Koh, the dean of Yale Law School and a State Department official in the Clinton administration. “Outrages upon personal dignity is something like Abu Ghraib or parading our soldiers in Vietnam before the television cameras,” he said. “Unconstitutionally vague means you don’t know it when you see it.”

But the new legislation would interpret “outrages upon personal dignity” relatively narrowly, adopting a standard enacted last year in an amendment to the Detainee Treatment Act proposed by Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona. The amendment prohibits “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment” and refers indirectly to an American constitutional standard that prohibits conduct which “shocks the conscience.”

There is substantial room for interpretation, legal experts said, between Common Article 3’s strict prohibition of, for instance, humiliating treatment and the McCain amendment’s ban only on conduct that “shocks the conscience.”

The proposed legislation, said Peter S. Margulies, a law professor at Roger Williams University, “seems to be trying to surgically remove from our compliance with Geneva the section of Common Article 3 that deals with humiliating and degrading treatment.”

The net effect of the new legislation in the interrogation context, Professor Yoo said, is to allow the C.I.A. flexibility of the sort that the revisions to the Army Field Manual have denied to the Pentagon. The bill lets the C.I.A. “operate with a freer hand” than the Defense Department “in that space between the Army Field Manual and the McCain amendment,” he said.

Dean Koh said the administration’s new interpretation of the Geneva Conventions would further isolate the United States from the rest of the world.

“Making U.S. ratification of Common Article 3 narrower and more conditional than everyone else’s,” he said, “by its very nature suggests that we are not prepared to make the same commitment that every other nation has made.”

The bill proposed by the White House would also amend the War Crimes Act, which makes violations of Common Article 3 a felony. Those amendments are needed, the administration said, to provide guidance to American personnel.

The new legislation makes a list of nine “serious violations” of Common Article 3 federal crimes. The prohibited conduct includes torture, murder, rape, and the infliction of severe physical or mental pain. By implication, some legal experts said, the bill endorses the use of those interrogation techniques that are not mentioned.

The proposed legislation in any event represents a further retreat from international legal standards by an administration already hostile to them, some scholars said. “It’s strong evidence that this administration doesn’t accept international legal processes,’’ said Peter J. Spiro, a law professor at Temple University. ++

Neil A. Lewis contributed reporting from Washington.

European Watchdog Calls for Clampdown on CIA
· UK is urged to take lead in monitoring agents
· Scathing attack on Bush, ‘the King John of USA’
Nicholas Watt and Suzanne Goldenberg
Friday, September 8, 2006 by the Guardian / UK
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0908-08.htm

The head of Europe’s human rights watchdog yesterday called for monitoring of CIA agents operating in Britain and other European countries, after President George Bush’s admission that the US had detained terrorist suspects in secret prisons.

Terry Davis, secretary general of the Council of Europe, said CIA agents operating in Europe should be subject to the same rules as British agents working for MI5 and MI6.
“There is a need to deal with the conduct of allied foreign security services agents active on the territory of a council member state,” Terry Davis said. “In the UK there is parliamentary scrutiny of the intelligence services but there is no parliamentary scrutiny of friendly foreign services. The UK should be in the lead on this issue.”

As part of this process, diplomatic immunity should be reviewed. “Immunity should not mean impunity,” he said.

Mr Davis also called for a ban on the transport of suspects in military aircraft. At the moment the prohibition applies only to civil aircraft.

The former British Labour MP was scathing about President Bush. “Why does the US need to keep people in secret prisons? I thought that was settled by Magna Carta. But King John is alive and well and running the USA.

“There is a smoking gun. We know where it is - it is in the hands of George Bush. His fingerprints are on the gun.”

Mr Davis’s remarks came as the man leading the Council of Europe’s investigation into the secret CIA prisons dismissed Mr Bush’s admission as “just one piece of the truth”. In an attempt to step up pressure on the US and European governments to come clean on the prisons, the Swiss senator Dick Marty said: “There is more, much more, to be revealed.”

Mr Bush said on Wednesday he ordered the transfer of 14 al-Qaida suspects from secret CIA jails to Guantánamo as a step to putting the men on trial. That revived concerns about torture and mistreatment of the detainees during their years in CIA custody, and the fairness of the military tribunals sought by the White House.

Human rights activists expect details of the treatment of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, said to have been the mastermind of the September 11 attacks, and the other al-Qaida suspects held incommunicado will emerge now that they are at Guantánamo and able to meet their lawyers. Administration officials said yesterday that Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, had assured the International Committee of the Red Cross it would have access to the prisoners and that discussions were under way to arrange meetings.

However, the administration also said yesterday it had no intention of satisfying European demands for fuller disclosure about the location of the secret prisons. “If the European countries want to continue to try to find out where the secret sites are, that is up to the Europeans,” John Bellinger III, legal adviser to Ms Rice, told reporters.

He also argued, as has Ms Rice, that Europeans were to some extent complicit with the clandestine detention. “Information derived from questioning individuals was shared with European countries, and it was shared in a way that saved European lives.” Washington also wants to use such secret jails in the future, Mr Bellinger said. “The president believes there needs to be a special programme if we capture an al-Qaida leader.”

Mr Marty said he was not surprised by Mr Bush’s disclosures. “This is no news for me,” said Mr Marty, who claimed earlier this year that 14 European countries colluded with US intelligence in a “spider’s web” of human rights abuses. “I have always been certain that these prisons existed, so I am not surprised.”

Other senior figures in the Council of Europe, who plan to intensify their investigations into allegations that Romania and Poland played host to many of the prisoners, also criticised the US. Rene van der Linden, president of the Council of Europe’s parliamentary assembly, said: “Our work has helped to flush out the dirty nature of this secret war which, we learn at last, has been carried out completely beyond any legal framework.

“Kidnapping people and torturing them in secret, however tempting the short-term gain may appear to be, is what criminals do, not democratic governments. In the long term, such practices create more terrorists and undermine the values we are fighting for.” ++

Are The Gitmo Gloves Back On?
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/09/06/are_the_gitmo_gloves_back_on.php

In light of President Bush’s amazing reversal today, acknowledging the existence of CIA “black sites,” granting Geneva protections to the desaparecidos held in them and transferring 14 of them to Guantanamo Bay, it’s important to reconstruct the full grand narrative of the past five years of his regime’s terror tactics. From the first reported murder of a detainee held at Bagram Air Force base in Afghanistan in 2002 through the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s Hamdan ruling this summer, Eric Umansky has written a remarkable piece for the Columbia Journalism Review tracing both the evidence of the administration’s policy of deliberately abusing detainees during interrogations and media coverage of those revelations.

“Ghost prisoners.” The Kafkaesque legal definitions of “torture” and “humane treatment.” “Secret renditions.” Lynndie England. The (in)famous McCain amendment. It’s all there, and it’s well worth reading the entire (lengthy) piece.

It tracks the remarkable investigative reporting which, long before Abu Ghraib was made famous, suggested that the administration’s policies, written and executed at the hands of Alberto Gonzales, John Ashcroft, Donald Rumsfeld, et al., specifically condoned the use of physical abuse that had resulted in detainee deaths. At the same time, it also tracks how various parts of the media repeatedly failed to make it clear to Americans the crimes their government was commiting, and most importantly, how the Bush administration ran an extremely clever counter-media campaign to prevent this shocking revolt against common American decency from ever turning into the scandal it deserved.

Complicating matters has been the Bush administration’s savvy defense. It has pushed back against calls for an independent, overarching investigation of abuses. Instead, there have been a dizzying number of fractured, limited-authority reports, all of which reporters have diligently sought to cover. But many of the reports are classified and ultimately heavily redacted, and none of them have looked specifically at the connection between policymakers and abuse. Indeed, the stonewalling has been part of a larger, smarter strategy: rather than defending its policies of abuse, the administration has denied the policies exist. …

In shaping the debate, the administration moved not only to distance itself publicly from those of its policies that abrogated the restrictions on abusive treatment, but also to keep those policies from being uncovered. Appearing in congressional hearings soon after the so-called torture memos were leaked, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft refused to discuss, release, or even acknowledge the memos and insisted that the administration had never approved torture. (The insistence that the U.S. didn’t engage in “torture” would often trip up many reporters, who weren’t aware that the administration defined “torture” exceedingly narrowly.) With the administration now refusing to acknowledge its policies of coercive interrogations, the debate on torture was reframed as a debate about whether there was a need for a debate.

The argument by the White House and its allies that there wasn’t a need for a debate was aided by many news organizations’ habit of presenting both sides of a story as if they were equal, regardless of the underlying reality. The result was a kind schizophrenic coverage: aggressive investigative pieces showed the extent to which policy had underwritten many abuses, while political and other stories passed along the administration’s assertions that abuse was the work of a few bad apples, without offering key context — namely that the facts suggested those assertions were untrue.

As the administration blocked attempts to create an overarching, independent investigation into abuses, a head-snapping number of reports of varying quality and focus by military officers — Taguba, Schlesinger, Schmidt, Fay, Hood, Church, and Green, among others — surfaced. None of them were tasked with looking at the role policy played in abuse. The reports did provide clues anyway — the details, if not the official conclusions, of the Taguba and Schlesinger reports were particularly strong. But the administration also worked to keep the details from the public.

The president’s announcement today comes coupled with the long-awaited release of the new Army field manual, containing explicit rules for interrogation of prisoners—rules which are now required by law to be followed by all Department of Defense employees and in all facilities run by the DoD.

Much to the pleasant surprise of many, the new manual clearly and simply promises the protections required by law of the Geneva Conventions for all detainees, eliminating any “double standard” where some detainees were protected and others were not, and contains no “classified” secret list of interrogation techniques.

This news is to be cheered, but also raises questions. Members of the Bush administration and their allies have spent the past five years arguing that the threat posed by al-Qaida required that our forces “take the gloves off” and brutalize detainees for our safety.

Are they claiming now that, contrary to all available evidence and common sense, the flames of war and chaos in the Middle East have sufficiently calmed down the terrorist threat that we are no longer in such danger?

Or are they tacitly admitting that, in fact, there was never any need to resort to brutality at all? ++

Questions Raised about Bush’s Primary Claims in Defense of Secret Detention System
Mark Mazzetti
September 8, 2006 by the New York Times
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0908-11.htm

WASHINGTON - In defending the Central Intelligence Agency’s secret network of prisons on Wednesday, President Bush said the detention system had used lawful interrogation techniques, was fully described to select members of Congress and led directly to the capture of a string of terrorists over the past four years.

A review of public documents and interviews with American officials raises questions about Mr. Bush’s claims on all three fronts.

Mr. Bush described the interrogation techniques used on the C.I.A. prisoners as having been “safe, lawful and effective,” and he asserted that torture had not been used. But the Bush administration has yet to make public the legal papers prepared by government lawyers that served as the basis for its determination that those procedures did not violate American or international law.

The president said the Department of Justice approved a set of aggressive interrogation practices for C.I.A. detainees in 2002 after milder ones proved ineffective on Abu Zubaydah, the first of the Qaeda leaders taken into custody.

Current and former government officials said that specific interrogation methods were addressed in a series of documents, including an August 2002 memorandum by the Justice Department that authorized the C.I.A.’s use of 20 interrogation practices.

The August 2002 document, which was leaked to reporters in 2004, said interrogation methods just short of those that might cause pain comparable to “organ failure, impairment of bodily function or even death” could be allowable without being considered torture.

The memorandum was repudiated in another Justice Department document at the end of 2004, and Congressional officials said on Thursday that they had not received documents from the administration explaining the legal underpinnings of the program.

One prisoner is known to have died in Afghanistan after interrogation by a C.I.A. contract employee, but the agency has distanced itself from that episode, and the former employee was convicted on assault charges last month in federal court in North Carolina.

Some lawmakers questioned Mr. Bush’s claims that his administration fully briefed some members of Congress on details of the secret detention program.

Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said on Wednesday that the Bush administration had “withheld details of the C.I.A. detention and interrogation program from the Congressional intelligence committees.”

Congressional officials said on Thursday that the Senate Intelligence Committee was briefed about the existence of the C.I.A. detention program but was not informed about the locations of the secret prisons.

Public documents show that some of the information that led to the arrests of senior terrorism plotters like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Ramzi bin al-Shibh was known before the C.I.A. detained its first prisoner, Mr. Zubaydah, in the spring of 2002.

Mr. Bush said it was Mr. Zubaydah who disclosed to C.I.A. interrogators that Mr. Mohammed was the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks and often used the alias Mukhtar, sometimes spelled Muktar.

“This was a vital piece of intelligence that helped our intelligence community pursue K.S.M.,” Mr. Bush said, referring to the terror suspect by his initials.

The report of the Sept. 11 commission said that the C.I.A. knew of the moniker for Mr. Mohammed months before the capture of Mr. Zubaydah.

According to the report, the C.I.A. unit given the task of tracking Osama bin Laden had intercepted a cable on Aug. 28, 2001, that revealed the alias of Mr. Mohammed.
Mr. Bush also said it was the interrogation of Mr. Zubaydah that identified Mr. bin al-Shibh as an accomplice in the Sept. 11 attacks.

American officials had identified Mr. bin al-Shibh’s role in the attacks months before Mr. Zubaydah’s capture. A December 2001 federal grand jury indictment of Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called 20th hijacker, said that Mr. Moussaoui had received money from Mr. bin al-Shibh and that Mr. bin al-Shibh had shared an apartment with Mohamed Atta, the ringleader of the plot.

A C.I.A. spokesman said Thursday that the agency had vetted the president’s speech and stood by its accuracy.

“Abu Zubaydah was the authoritative source who identified Khalid Shaikh Mohammed as the mastermind of 9/11 and the man behind the nickname Muktar,” the spokesman, Paul Gimigliano, said in a statement. “His position in Al Qaeda — his access to terrorist secrets — gave his reporting exceptional weight and it gave C.I.A. insights that were truly unique and vital. Abu Zubaydah not only identified Ramzi Bin al-Shibh as a 9/11 accomplice — something that had been done before — he provided information that helped lead to his capture.”

Besides the 14 prisoners identified on Wednesday, some officials and human rights advocates questioned the fate of dozens of others believed to have moved through the C.I.A. prison network over the past four years.

Human Rights Watch, in response to a request from The New York Times, provided a list of 14 men who the organization believes have been secretly detained since the Sept. 11 attacks and whose whereabouts are still unknown.

One of the men, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, is believed to have given false information about links between Iraq and Al Qaeda after C.I.A. officials transferred him to Egyptian custody in 2002. Mr. al-Libi’s statements were used by the Bush administration as the foundation for its claims that Iraq trained Qaeda members to use biological and chemical weapons.

It emerged later that Mr. al-Libi had fabricated these stories while in captivity to avoid harsh treatment by his Egyptian captors.

Human Rights Watch has also identified 20 other men it said were at the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and who the group believes were once in C.I.A. custody. ++

Even on 9/11, neocon chickenhawks can’t refrain from straw men attacks
David Sirota
9.11.06
http://www.workingforchange.com/blog/

In case you thought the anniversary of 9/11 would tone down the rhetoric and the dishonest creation of straw men that don’t exist, think again. Over the last week, we’ve been treated to some good ol’ fashioned McCarthyism - that is, attacks on unnamed groups of people who supposedly advocate for signing a peace treaty with Osama bin Laden, and who supposedly think President Bush is a greater enemy to our country than terrorists.

There was Rush Limbaugh on CBS last week who said:

“Some say we should try diplomacy…Some Americans, sadly, are not interested in victory…Critics are more interested in punishing this country over a few incidents of Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay than they are in defeating those who want to kill.”

Then, like clockwork, the Democratic Leadership Council chimed in through their spokesman Marshall Wittman, a former top official for the Christian Coalition. In his 9/11 piece shedding crocodile tears for the rise of polarization he purports to hate, he makes this outrageously polarizing and inflammatory statement:

“Some believe that our President is a greater threat to our security than the Islamic-fascists.”

You’ll notice, of course, that neither Limbaugh or the DLC actually names anyone. Instead, like the loyal McCarthyist disciples they are, they prefer to use the nebulous “some.” Why? Because they can’t actually name any single political figure who even comes close to fitting their dishonest descriptions. But because these two chickenhawks who helped push us into war while hiding behind their pundit chairs need to feel big and manly and tough because they were always made fun of and beat up on the kickball field and mocked for wetting their beds as children they feel the need to resort to making up strawmen.

Honestly, I really thought this kind of thing would stop, at least for 24 hours, so that the country could mourn the dead. Apparently, though, there is no line that cannot be crossed anymore if you are a right-wing talk show host, or a spokesman for a corporate-funded, neocon front group in Washington. All of this - the dead victims, the sickened first responders - is just one big joke to people like Limbaugh and Wittman. So blinded by their desperation to promote themselves, they are willing to defile even the most sacred of days. ++

What’s right and good doesn’t come naturally. You have to stand up and fight for it - as if the cause depends on you, because it does. Allow yourself that conceit - to believe that the flame of Democracy will never go out as long as there’s one candle in your hand.
~ Bill Moyers

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Add comment September 20th, 2006

“Why do they hate us?”

If ever a naive, idiosyncratic and self-absorbed question was asked, that was it … it was asked with the collective voice of wounded children; it was uninformed, simplistic and bewildered. And it was answered with partisan political bullshit. The real answers to such a question had not been sought nor welcomed prior to 9/11 … as they are not, now.

To those citizens who actually wanted an answer to that question, slogging toward truth has been a sorrowful and difficult journey. Many have found it, along with a disdain for the political and militaristic machine our nation has become; others are disenchanted on some levels, but fail to see the actual mechanisms … waking up is hard to do, taking responsibility for Now means that we are accountable for all the Then’s that slipped our attention — and leaves us with a sour taste for what our nation is today. Very difficult Truth for a country that dotes on comfort and entertainment … much too harsh a reality to embrace with open arms. Destroys the American mythology … and if that’s not true, what ELSE isn’t true?

Americans are many things, both attractive and un, but they are fair-minded. When they are not being spun like yoyo’s or fed propaganda through an IV drip, they are decent people who do not wish ill on others. They are, in this, somewhat simplistic … and I have no issue with that — George Bush has given the concept of “simple” a very bad name. Simple is just … uncluttered, uncomplicated. Thoreau’s “simple life” was a superior concept even in a time when we were not so distracted by rules and goods and information as we are today; now, run like rats through a maze of consumerism and nationalism and subject to a thousand and one laws that not only morph on a daily basis but for which “the ignorance of which is no excuse” — we simply have no path toward “simplicity,” nor does it look attractive to us until we near exhaustion.

The events of 9/11 gave us not a “new Pearl Harbor” upon which to build an even bigger war machine that we can use to collide into a world made hostile by our policies, but a mirror into which we could see ourselves as others see us. What they saw is what we must see … that a simple, and powerful, element has been missing from our National governance for many years. Ethics. We are no longer an ethical nation.

That’s the simple … and tragic … answer to why they hate us.

To pound home that point, the fates have conspired to give us one of the most unethical presidents in history. The public is suspicious, now … they know something’s wrong — but they are still clutching at straws that America has not become what they fear it has; it will take more courage on their part to face this truth. There is a reckoning due on these shores … the next few years will tell us how that all turns it. But it’s coming on, you can feel it growing and shifting … and the more heavy-handed the government becomes, the more the public wonders what happened to that “shining city on a hill” that they determined they would establish — what happened to the simple, fair-minded ethics upon which it was built.

Fear isn’t going to win the day, dearhearts. Simplicity will, eventually; decency. An awakened American psyche does not have the capacity to tromp through the 21st Century as a thug, a bully, a plundering, lumbering giant … and as we awaken to what the government has become, what it is making of us, our response will be simple enough for even the hard-hearts to understand. We know how to stop this, it ain’t pretty but we’ve done it before.

There is still smoke … it’s hard to see through the smoke when it takes courage to try … but the mirrors keep flashing. This day offers another glimpse of the very mirror that began the smoke machine — reestablishing the America we love depends on us looking into it unafraid.

Here’s a few good pieces on the “why’s.”

Jude

September 11th, Our Report
Marc Ash
t r u t h o u t | Executive Director
Monday 11 September 2006
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/091106Z.shtml

This report is dedicated to those lost.

In this report, we will attempt to clarify to the best of our ability what brought about the attacks of September 11th, 2001.

History
We will proceed on the premise that persons of Islamic faith and militant resistance to American and Western influence in Islamic countries did carry out the attacks of September 11th, 2001.

To understand the attacks of September 11th, it is important to maintain some historical perspective. The militant Islamic resistance that Western countries are now confronted with has its origins in the Crusades of the Middle Ages. While the Crusades may no longer be important to most Westerners, they are to Muslims. The invaders were called Infidels then, and they still are today.

In Islamic countries, Infidels are not hated for their beliefs but rather for their actions. Western influence over the affairs of Islamic countries over the centuries has been profound, and especially so over the past hundred years. The Middle east, referred to by the West as the Crossroads of the World, has been militarily dominated, economically exploited, and culturally ravaged by the West.

One of the most effective methods for maintaining control of local interests for the purpose of American corporate profit has been using US military might to establish surrogate “sovereign” regimes. Often referred to as “puppet governments,” these ruling factions are often repressive, dictatorial and corrupt. The Shah of Iran, the Kuwaiti Royal Family and, yes, Saddam Hussein’s Baathists are but a few such examples of governments installed and supported by the US.

There is organized resistance to Western colonial influence in these countries. That resistance has taken on many forms and employed many methods over the years. The most high-profile and most violent organization to emerge over the past quarter century has been al-Qaeda, led by Osama bin Laden. Ironically, bin Laden too was at one time trained and supported by the US. Al-Qaeda is only one of many organizations that foment militant resistance to Western colonialism in Islamic countries. Sometimes those various organizations cooperate, and sometimes they do not.

The Attacks
The attacks of September 11th, 2001, were by no means an isolated occurrence. They were part of a continuing string of attacks orchestrated by bin Laden’s network. It should be noted that al-Qaeda appears to be only a part of a larger, continually evolving network of militant resistance cells. The unifying thread appears to be the leaders, rather than the specific organizations themselves.

Clearly, what set the September 11th attacks apart from other attacks attributed to bin Laden’s network was the scale. We find the sheer number of hijackers and planes to be key to understanding where our system failed in preventing the attacks. There were 19 hijackers directly involved and four intercontinental aircraft. It was a big operation, not, as some have suggested, a needle in a haystack.

We find that the scale of the 9/11 operation made it visible during its staging. Indeed many of those who would pilot the hijacked aircraft obtained training to do so at accredited US aviation training facilities. Further, their activities did attract the attention of federal authorities, and high priority reports were filed by federal agents alerting their superiors to the danger.

We find the time that elapsed during actual attacks to be very significant. The total time the hijacked planes were known to be in the possession of the hijackers was nearly two hours. That raises the issue of the role played by the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD). We find that the NORAD system is indeed designed to address, and is quite capable of addressing, this type of attack. We find, further, that no plausible reason has been stated by NORAD officials as to why that system, designed and fully prepared to address such an attack, did not.

At Fault
We find the greatest single cause of the attacks of September 11th, 2001, to be US and Western domination of the best interests of Islamic nations. We find such intervention, often carried out in recent years by the US military under the umbrella of US National Security, is clearly a detriment to that security. We find that it is the interests of large corporations - particularly those related to the energy and arms industries - that have become the priority for US military planners. We find that such militarily-backed intervention spawned a militant and determined resistance that was responsible for the attacks of September 11th, 2001. We find that such resistance will grow in response to continued US military intervention in the sovereign affairs of these nations. We recommend that the US public demand the US military be used solely for the national defense.

We find that the US airport security screening process is, for the most part, poor. We further find that private security interests tend to make profits their number one priority rather than public safety. Proponents of privatization have done a profound disservice to public safety by advocating profit-driven solutions rather than public-controlled solutions that would be more directly accountable to public oversight. We find that the public does itself a disservice by not demanding better.

The North American Aerospace Defense Command failed to do its job on the morning of September 11th, 2001. Why is still not clear. To date, no reasonable accounting of why NORAD simply did not do what it was clearly designed and well equipped to do has been forth coming. We recommend that the public redouble its efforts to investigate NORAD’s still unexplained absence on the morning of September 11th, 2001.

The American People
We find the US citizen to be at fault for not being aware of the actions of the government that represents them. While any departure from the public trust by a public entity should be regarded as an indictment of that entity, the ultimate responsibility for overseeing the public trust falls upon the citizens themselves. We find average Americans dangerously disengaged from the activities of their government. We find that greater involvement by US citizens in the day-to-day administration of governmental activities would do more to insure the wellbeing of public interests than any other factor. We recommend an immediate increase in the involvement by US citizens in the administration of all levels of government - local, state and federal.

The Bush Administration
As part of its charter, the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (also known as the 9-11 Commission) was prohibited from pursuing a critical examination of the Bush administration’s role. We have no such restrictions and, as the Bush administration was the supreme controlling American authority, we have reviewed their actions.

We find that an examination of the creation of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States provides powerful insight into the role played by the Bush administration before and after the attacks of September 11th.

We find that the Bush administration used the power of the executive branch for months after the attacks of 9/11 to block the creation of any official investigation into the action of the US government. Further, such resistance by the Bush administration to an official investigation continued in the face of repeated demands by the families of the victims of the attacks. It was, in fact, that very pressure from the victims’ families that forced the Bush administration to reverse their position and negotiate the creation of investigative body. However, during those negotiations, the Bush administration refused - again - to cooperate, until two demands were met: The 9/11 Commission must agree not to investigate the executive branch, and the Bush administration itself must be allowed to appoint - without review - the chairman of the commission.

Clearly the Bush administration used, from the start, the power it had negotiated to protect its own interests. The appointment of former Nixon secretary of state Henry Kissinger as 9/11C chairman drew immediate fire from critics, who charged that Kissinger would be more likely to obscure the truth than reveal it. Kissinger resigned less than two weeks later, after refusing to reveal the names of corporations whose interests he represented. The subsequent appointment of former New Jersey Republican governor Thomas Kean was less controversial but ultimately subject to the final authority, the Bush administration.

We find that the objectivity and impartiality of the 9/11C must have been compromised by being under the direct control of the Bush administration. Further, such direct control of the 9/11C by Bush administration officials renders the conclusions of the actions of the Bush administration before, during, and after the attacks of 9/11 by the 9/11C fatally discredited. In short: We find that there has been no meaningful independent official investigation of the actions of the Bush administration’s actions before, during, and after the attacks of 9/11.

We find that many high-ranking Bush administration officials hold personal financial interests in the Middle East region. We find that the attacks and resulting military campaigns did significantly enrich - personally - many high-ranking Bush administration officials. Those officials include, but are not limited to: George W. Bush, through his family’s oil and energy holdings in the region and their interest in the international arms trade through the Carlyle group; and Richard Cheney, through an ongoing relationship with the Halliburton Corporation and its subsidiaries. In addition, Condoleezza Rice’s free movement back and forth between the job of National Security Adviser to Chevron director and back to National Security Adviser again creates a conflict of interest.

Our Recommendations
Above all else, the most important thing to the families of the victims of September 11th, 2001, to the communities most directly affected by the disaster, to the American people, who are still paying the price and will be for a long time to come, and to the world is a meaningful, transparent investigation.

The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States was an inherently political function; as such it failed. The “9/11 Commission” could not or would not pursue avenues of investigation that would bring to account the executive branch of the US federal government, in fact was prohibited from doing so in its charter.

We call for the naming of a Special Counsel. As an extension of the Department of Justice’s investigation of the attacks of September 11th, an independent counsel must be named. That Special Counsel must be free of political influence. Since the Bush administration as the executive branch must necessarily be examined, no Bush administration-appointed official, including Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, should be involved in the selection of the Special Counsel or oversight of the Special Counsel’s work. ++

The End of the “End of History”
JEAN BRICMONT
September 11, 2006
http://www.counterpunch.org/

Jean Bricmont sat down and wrote this essay a few days after the attacks of September 11, 2001. It was published in Europe in French in a number of venues including Le Monde, on September 27, 2001, under the title “Quelques questions à l’empire et aux autres”. This is the first time it has appeared in English, with very minor changes.

All was going well. Serbia, on its knees, had just sold Milosevic to the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague for a fistful of dollars (some of which, it was learned later, went to pay debts accumulated since the time of Tito). NATO was stretching eastward as Russia looked on helplessly. Whenever one wished, one could, in all impunity, “bomb Saddam Hussein” (that is, the Iraqi population). The Palestinian territories were under tight police control and their leaders assassinated by smart bombs. In recent years, stockholders had made record profits. The political left no longer existed, all parties having rallied to neo-liberalism and “humanitarian” military intervention. In short, even if we had not yet arrived at the “end of history”; its course was well under control and its “happy ending” in sight.

And then — shock, surprise, horror — the greatest power of all time struck in the very center of its wealth and strength. A sophisticaled electronic spy network had been unable to do anything to prevent the catastrophe.

I do not, of course; share the “values” of Ms. Albright who, when asked if the death of a half million Iraqi children is “worth it”, replies: “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price–we think the price is worth it” . The massacre of innocent civilians does not ever seem to me to be worth it. This does not prevent me from considering it necessary, on the occasion of that tragedy, to ask a few questions.

An American pacifist, A.J. Muste, once observed that the big problem after a war is the winning side: it has learned that violence pays. All of post-World War II history illustrates the pertinence of that remark. In the United States; the War Department was renamed Defense Department, although in reality there was no direct danger threatening the country, and successive American governments embarked on campaigns of military intervention and political destabilization. It takes a large dose of good will to see all that as a mere attempt to contain communism. But let us stick to current events and try to see how they look outside West — without trying to think in terms of another culture or another religion, but simply asking ourselves how we would react if we were confronted with certain situations:

The Kyoto protocol: The American objections are not primarily scientific, but of the type: “it would hurt our economy”. How does that reaction sound to people who work twelve hours per day for starvation wages?

The Durban conference — [ i.e., the World Conference against racism, held in Durban (South Africa), from August 31 to September 7 2001. It was widely criticized in the West for its support of Palestinians.]

The West rejects any suggestion of reparations for slavery and colonialism. But how is it possible not to see that the State of Israel functions as a reparation for anti-Semitic persecutions, except that, in this case, the price is paid by Arabs for the crimes committed by Europeans? And how is it possible not to understand that, to the victims of colonialism, this shift of responsibility looks like a manifestation of racism?

Afghanistan: The Americans did not hesitate to train and arm bin Laden to destabilize the Soviet Union, according to a scenario developed by President Carter’s advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski. How many lives are lost in the game that Brzezinski called “the Great Chessboard”? And how many terrorists, in Asia, in Central America, in the Balkans or in the Middle East, are left to their own devices after having served the “free world”?

Iraq: For ten years the population has been strangled by an embargo that has cost hundreds of thousands of lives — of people who are also civilian victims, even if they are not shown on television. All that because Iraq attempted to recuperate oil wells that had been de facto confiscated by the British.

Compare this to the treatment of Israel which occupies, in perfect illegality, territories conquered in 1967. Does one really think that the idea, generally accepted in the West, that Saddam Hussein is to blame for everything, makes a big impression in the Arab-Muslim world?

China: When an American spy plane is shot down along the Chinese coast on April 1, 2001, and its crew is briefly held prisoner, there is indignation: how dare the Chinese? But how many Chinese or Indian spy planes venture to fly along American coasts?

USA: Is it really of foremost importance to squander the planet’s rare resources, including brains, to build an antiballistic shield that will not protect the United States from terrorist attacks and, eventually, not even from nuclear attacks?

All that doesn’t excuse terrorism, they will say. Agreed, but it does make it possible to undertand why the reaction outside the United States is often mixed: sympathy for the victims, yes; for the American government that tries to play on emotions to legitmatize its policies and is getting ready to violate international law once again, no.

By a pure coincidence; the attacks took place on September 11, anniversary of the overthrow of Allende (1973), which marked not only the installation of the first neo-liberal government, that of Pinochet, but also the beginning of the end of the national and independent movements in the Third World — roughly speaking, those that emerged from the Bandung Conference — which would all soon bend to the dictates of the United States and the IMF. That coincidence recalls that the West’s victory over independent political movements in the Third World has been achieved by methods that are far from democratic: Pinochet, obviously, but also the assassination of Lumumba, terrorist armies in Central America, and, last but not least, support to “good” Islamic fundamentalists in Saudi Arabia and in Afghanistan. In fact, so long as the obscurantist and feudalist forces could be used against the political left, they were employed profusely. If the accusations against those forces turn out to be true, it will be appropriate to meditate on that curious irony of history.

Marx thought that a political struggle against oppression would cause religious obscurantism to recede. For the past twenty years, the trend is in the opposite direction: the more the political left loses ground; the more obscurantism asserts itself, and not only in the Muslim world. And this is largely because it has become the only possible form of protest against this “vale of tears” on earth.

In the West; the “firm responses” will of course be applauded when they come. Numerous intellectuals will be found to link those attacks to whatever they don’t like in the world: Saddam Hussein, Western pacifists, the Palestine liberation movement, and, while they are at it, the “anti-globalization” movement. Spy networks will be built. Citizens will be watched more closely. Edifying stories will be told about the struggle between Good and Evil and the wicked people who attack us because they don’t like democracy; or women’s liberation, or multiculturalism. It will be explained that we have nothing to do with such barbarism — indeed, we prefer to bomb from on high or use embargoes to kill people gradually. But none of that will solve any basic problem. Terrorism grows in the soil of revolt which is itself nourished by injustice in the world.

For the immediate future, it is to be feared that those attacks will have at least two negative political consequences. On the one hand, the American population, which in its vast majority displays a disturbing nationalism, risks “rallying around the flag”, as they put it, and supporting their government’s policy, no matter how barbarous it is. It wants, more than ever, to “protect its way of life”, without asking the price paid by the rest of the planet. The timid movements of dissent that have appeared since Seattle will no doubt be marginalized or even criminalized. On the other hand, millions of people, who have been defeated, humiliated and crushed by the United States all around the world, will be tempted to see in terrorism the only weapon that can really strike the Empire. That is why a political — and not terrorist — struggle against the cultural, economic and especially military domination of a tiny minority of the human race over the vast majority is more necessary than ever. ++

Jean Bricmont teaches physics in Belgium. He is a member of the Brussells Tribunal. His new book, Humanitarian Imperialism, will be published by Monthly Review Press.

Forgetting September 11
Time to Join the Rest of the World
ANTHONY ALESSANDRINI
September 11, 2006
http://www.counterpunch.org/alessandrini09112006.html

September 11, 2006 marks the fifth anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

If you are living in the United States, there is no way that you could have escaped from reading or hearing the sentence above, or something like it, over the past few weeks. One might think that it would be unnecessary to have to write or utter such a sentence, but nevertheless there isn’t a mass media organ anywhere in the country that does not seem to feel the need to remind us, lest we forget, that September 11 is the anniversary of September 11.

Every day, residents of New York City still encounter bumper stickers and signs and other public markers exhorting us to “never forget” that date. But how could it be possible to do so?

September 11, we have continually been told, was perhaps the most historic day in the history of the United States, the day when “our” lives-indeed, the entire world-changed forever. It would be hard to imagine the possibility of forgetting, even if you tried.

In his book Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson suggests that one of the most important developments in the history of nationalism was the daily newspaper. Every morning, people within a bounded geographical region read essentially the same news in the same language, with a few minor variations. The general point of similarity, from the perspective of those reading the newspaper, is that all the news contained in it is somehow relevant to “us.” This “us” is usually contained within national borders. If a plane crashes in Germany and five Americans are injured, this latter fact is taken to be news of a particular kind. Anderson is interested in the way this conveyance of news actually creates the “us” of national identification as an emotional connection: after all, the chances are that I, the average reader, have never met any of the five people on that plane; they might live thousands of miles away and have nothing in common with me. And yet, they are part of a larger “us” that we are constantly called upon to recognize; they make up that large group referred to by U.S. presidents as “my fellow Americans.”

It is in this specific context that I propose a certain kind of remembering, and a certain kind of forgetting. Certainly, do not forget those who died on September 11, 2001. But remember them in the larger context of the millions of people throughout the world who have faced the consequences wrought by the U.S. government and its allies in retaliation. Don’t forget the events that happened on September 11, 2001 and their aftermath; forget “September 11″ as a glib phrase that has obfuscated this larger context and has been instead used by the U.S. government to wreak havoc throughout the world in the name of a principle that has not yet been actively rejected by people in the United States: the principle that American lives are somehow worth more than the lives of others.

In this context, it becomes necessary to try to imagine the five years since September 11, 2001 from the perspective of people in Afghanistan, who bore the first brunt of the U.S. government’s revenge. The initial U.S.-led attack alone, mostly in the form of an air campaign, killed an estimated 3,400 people. Thousands more have died due the subsequent violence that has marked the continuing U.S.-led occupation of the country. Lest we forget, the establishment of a pattern of collective punishment and slaughter perpetrated against a larger population that had nothing to do with a given an act of aggression-which we have seen repeated in recent months by the Israeli government against populations in Gaza and Lebanon-was firmly set in place by the U.S. attack on and occupation of Afghanistan in retaliation for the attacks of September 11.

While the attack on Afghanistan was being carried out, people in the United States were introduced to two innovations in governance: the Patriot Act, part of an unprecedented attack on civil liberties whose effects are only now beginning to make themselves known through revelations such as those involving the National Security Agency; and the unveiling of the term “enemy combatants,” as part of the U.S government’s equally unprecedented attack on the guiding principles of international law and, in practice, as part of the larger process that has led to the detention, imprisonment, and torture of thousands of people throughout the world in a global prison system the full extent and horrors of which still remain unknown to us.

The anniversary of September 11, 2001 has to be viewed from the perspective of people in Iraq, who-as we now know-were always seen by the Bush Administration as the primary target of its manipulation of “September 11.” Two years ago, estimates of the number of Iraqis killed as a result of the U.S.-led invasion and occupation stood at 100,000; according to recent reports, more than 10,000 have been killed in the last four months alone. But one does not have to engage in this calculus of horror to understand the scale of the destruction unleashed by the U.S. government wielding a sword labeled “September 11.”

If we can allow ourselves to forget this “September 11,” we might be able to remember that five years ago marked the beginning of a specific pattern of targeting communities in the United States that continues today. In the first year following September 11, 2001, three thousand Arabs, Muslims, and South Asians were detained in the United States without criminal charges. Thousands more have faced detention and deportation since then. Today U.S. politicians from both parties actively embrace racial profiling measures at airports and other public places-for “our” safety, of course. If it were not for the cloud of fear that has been caused by the constant invocation of “September 11,” these proposals-essentially a set of differential and discriminatory laws, policies, and procedures directed at a particular group of citizens and residents based on their race, ethnicity, and/or religion-would be instantly identifiable for what they are: a recipe for apartheid.

In short, if people in the United States can forget the official version of “September 11,” we stand a chance of remembering what these five years have meant to all the people of the world: in Palestine, as Ariel Sharon and the Israeli government instantly picked up the rhetoric of the U.S. government and began to intensify the brutality of its acts of repression and ethnic cleansing in the name of the global “war on terror”; in Haiti, as Haitians had to withstand yet another all-too-familiar intervention and occupation by U.S. and French troops; in Iran and Syria, which have lived under the threat of a U.S. attack since the inception of the war in Iraq; in Colombia, the first target of the Bush Administration’s re-positioning of the “war on drugs” within the terms of the “war on terror,” as Alvaro Uribe used his financial and military backing from the U.S. to consolidate power and repress dissent; in the Philippines, another “front” of the U.S.-backed “war on terror,” where Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s government has similarly used the rhetoric that has arisen since “September 11″ in order to repress democratic dissent.

In fact, if people in the United States can manage to momentarily forget “our” September 11, we might even be able to remember, against the forgetting pushed upon us, that the world did not begin on September 11, 2001. As a particular pneumonic device, there is the memory of what Ariel Dorfman and others have called “the other September 11″: September 11, 2006 marks the thirty-fifth anniversary of the U.S.-sponsored coup in Chile that overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende. This can help us remember the struggle of people throughout the Americas against U.S. imperialism that has been going on for decades and that continues today.

This particular form of historical remembering also means remembering-or, for many people, learning for the first time-that none of what has been listed above as the aftermath of “September 11″ in fact began on that day. Afghanistan had been a site of U.S.-sponsored violence since the Cold War days of the 1980s; Iraq has been under attack at the hands of the U.S. and its allies in the form of sanctions and air strikes since 1991; in the other instances, the “war on terror” has led to the intensification of already-existing forms of repression and violence, generally with U.S. funding and military support, over the past five years. In the U.S. itself, all of the necessary laws and mechanisms necessary for the Patriot Act and the state of siege imposed against particular immigrant communities since September 11, 2001 had already been put in place under the Clinton Administration throughout the 1990s. This is not to mention the many communities in the United States, foremost among them the African American community, who have not had a moment of respite from “racial profiling” and a state of lived apartheid since the establishment of the nation.

All this remembering needs to begin immediately. For among the many ways that the left in the United States failed after September 11, 2001, this is one of the most important: the failure to fight to make people in the United States see their own place in the world. In the days immediately following the attacks, Slavoj Zizek wrote of the experience of walking the streets of lower Manhattan, still filled with rubble and clouded with smoke, and of another scene that came to mind: “If one adds to the situation in New York rapist gangs and a dozen or so snipers blindly targeting people who walk along the streets, one gets an idea about what Sarajevo was a decade ago.” For this, he was roundly criticized, including by those on the left, for “insensitivity.” Apparently, “our” pain was incomparable to the pain of the rest of the world.

But this point is more crucial today than ever before. People in New York are far from the only ones who have had to watch the bodies of loved ones brought out from the rubble of a destroyed building. (If you can forget “September 11,” you might remember Lebanon.) This was true before September 11, 2001; and, thanks largely to the military efforts of the U.S. government, it has certainly been true over the past five years. The unspoken consensus among people in the United States that American lives are worth more than others must be addressed and dispelled once and for all, and this effort must become a major part of the fight against the Bush administration’s “war on terror.”

This inability to overcome American parochialism and to allow people here to imagine a larger-than-national mindset-call it a critical internationalism, call it a radical cosmopolitanism, call it what you like-continues to haunt the present. It is this sense of isolation from the rest of the world that allows people in this country to be again and again convinced by various administrations that the role of the United States is to somehow oversee and police the world, rather than to become part of building international solutions. Of course, like the police themselves in all too many places, the government of the United States remains entirely unaccountable, either to the people of the world or even to its own citizens.

But another thing has happened during those five years whose anniversary we are being told to commemorate. Around the world, people’s movements have constantly resisted the U.S. government’s attempts to impose its own vision of the world through the use of “September 11.”

In place of this “September 11,” I offer another date to remember: February 15, 2003, when more than eleven million people across the world stood together, not just against the imminent U.S. attack on Iraq, but against the larger imposition of U.S. hegemony across the globe.

The spirit of resistance that came together on February 15 still exists; it manifests itself, for example, in the protests that erupt every time a U.S. official sets foot anywhere in the world today. But the millions who stood, and who continue to stand, against the actions of the U.S. government are also watching us today, and wondering-as they should-about the relative lack of resistance on the part of people here in the United States against their own government’s acts of terror since September 11, 2001. It is past time for people in the United States to forget the official version of “September 11″ and to join this new world that was glimpsed on February 15.

For the corollary of Zizek’s point, in comparing New York and Sarajevo, was that only by accepting such a connection can Americans begin to make what he called “the long-overdue move from ‘A thing like this should not happen HERE!’ to ‘A thing like this should not happen ANYWHERE!’”

Forgetting “September 11″ is an important step towards a very different kind of remembering of the events of that day within a larger history and a larger context, one that extends beyond national borders and imagines a different kind of world. It would mean, for people in the United States, at long last trying to find a way, with due humility, to join the rest of the world. ++

What’s right and good doesn’t come naturally. You have to stand up and fight for it - as if the cause depends on you, because it does. Allow yourself that conceit - to believe that the flame of Democracy will never go out as long as there’s one candle in your hand.
~ Bill Moyers

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

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