9-11 (4 page)

We are left with two choices: either Bush and associates are guilty of the “supreme international crime” including all the evils that follow, crimes that go vastly beyond anything attributed to bin Laden; or else we declare that the Nuremberg proceedings were a farce and that the allies were guilty of judicial murder. Again, that is entirely independent of the question of the guilt of those charged: established by the Nuremberg Tribunal in the case of the Nazi criminals, plausibly surmised from the outset in the case of bin Laden, though the opportunity to prove the case in court was withdrawn by Obama.

A few days before the bin Laden assassination, Orlando Bosch died peacefully in Florida, where he resided along with his accomplice Luis Posada Carrilles and many other associates in international terrorism. After he was accused of dozens of terrorist crimes by the FBI, Bosch was
granted a presidential pardon by Bush I over the objections of the Justice Department, which found the conclusion “inescapable that it would be prejudicial to the public interest for the United States to provide a safe haven for Bosch.”
²⁹
The coincidence of deaths at once calls to mind the Bush II doctrine, which has “already become a de facto rule of international relations,” according to the noted Harvard international relations specialist Graham Allison. The doctrine revokes “the sovereignty of states that provide sanctuary to terrorists,” Allison writes, referring to the pronouncement of Bush II, directed to the Taliban, that “those who harbor terrorists are as guilty as the terrorists themselves.” Such states, therefore, have lost their sovereignty and are fit targets for bombing and terror; for example, the state that harbored Bosch and his associates. When Bush issued this new “de facto rule of international relations,” no one seemed to notice that he was calling for invasion and destruction of the U.S. and murder of its criminal presidents.
³⁰

None of this is problematic, of course, if we reject Justice Jackson’s principle of universality, and adopt instead the principle that the U.S. is self-immunized against international law and conventions—as, in fact, the government has frequently made very clear, an important fact, much too little understood.

It is also worth thinking about the name given to the operation: Operation Geronimo. The imperial mentality is so profound that few seem able to perceive that the White House is glorifying bin Laden by calling him “Geronimo”—the Apache Indian chief who led the courageous
resistance to the invaders who sought to consign his people to the fate of “that hapless race of native Americans, which we are exterminating with such merciless and perfidious cruelty, among the heinous sins of this nation, for which I believe God will one day bring [it] to judgement,” in the words of the great grand strategist John Quincy Adams, the intellectual architect of manifest destiny, long after his own contributions to these sins had passed. Some did comprehend, not surprisingly. The remnants of that hapless race protested vigorously. The same was true elsewhere, notably in Mexico, where there was great outrage and disbelief—among people who have not forgotten that the “heinous sin” was carried out in territories stolen from Mexico in a war of aggression.

The casual choice of the name is reminiscent of the ease with which we name our murder weapons after victims of our crimes: Apache, Blackhawk, Tomahawk.… We might react differently if the Luftwaffe were to call its fighter planes “Jew” and “Gypsy.”

The examples mentioned would fall under the category of “American exceptionalism,” were it not for the fact that easy suppression of one’s own crimes is virtually ubiquitous among powerful states, at least those that are not defeated and forced to acknowledge reality. Other current illustrations are too numerous to mention. To take just one, of great current significance, consider Obama’s terror weapons (drones) in Pakistan. Suppose that during the 1980s, when they were occupying Afghanistan, the Russians had carried out targeted assassinations in Pakistan aimed at those who were financing, arming, and training
the insurgents—quite proudly and openly. For example, targeting the CIA station chief in Islamabad, who explained that he “loved” the “noble goal” of his mission: to “kill Soviet Soldiers … not to liberate Afghanistan.”

There is no need to imagine the reaction, but there is a crucial distinction: That was
them
, this is
us
.

What are the likely consequences of the killing of bin Laden? For the Arab world, it will probably mean little. He had long been a fading presence, and in the past few months was eclipsed by the Arab Spring. His significance in the Arab world is captured by the headline in the
New York Times
for an op-ed by Middle East/al Qaeda specialist Gilles Kepel; “Bin Laden was Dead Already” (May 7). Kepel writes that few in the Arab world are likely to care. That headline might have been dated far earlier, had the U.S. not mobilized the Jihadi movement by the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq, as suggested by the intelligence agencies and scholarship. As for the Jihadi movement, within it bin Laden was doubtless a venerated symbol, but apparently did not play much more of a role for this “network of networks,” as analysts call it, which undertake mostly independent operations.

As already discussed, Operation Geronimo might have been the spark that set off a conflagration in Pakistan, with dire consequences. Perhaps the assassination was perceived by the administration as an “act of vengeance,” as Robertson concludes.
³¹
And perhaps the rejection of the legal option of a trial reflects a difference between the moral culture of 1945 and today, as he suggests. Whatever the motive was, it could hardly have been security. As in the case of the “supreme international crime” in Iraq, the bin
Laden assassination is another illustration of the important fact that security is often not a high priority for state action, contrary to received doctrine.

There is much more to say, but even the most obvious and elementary facts should provide us with a good deal to think about when we consider 9/11 and its consequences, and what they portend for the future.

NOTES

1.
Faris Ali, “Suspected Suicide Bombing Kills 34 in Pakistan,” Reuters, June 11, 2011,
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/11/us-pakistan-blasts-idUSTRE75A1TQ20110611
; “Bombings Kill Dozens in Pakistan,”
New York Times
, June 11, 2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/12/world/asia/12peshawar.html?ref=world
; Hashim Shukoor, “At Least 21 Killed in Afghanistan Attacks,”
Truthout
, June 11, 2011,
http://www.truth-out.org/least-21-killed-afghanistan-attacks/1307889681
; Jack Healy, “Car Bombings and Shooting of Family Kill 11 in Iraq,”
New York Times, June
11, 2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/12/world/middleeast/12iraq.html?_r=1&ref=world
.

2.
Alissa Rubin, “For Red Cross, Aid Conditions Hit New Low in Afghanistan,”
New York Times
, Dec. 16, 2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/16/world/asia/16redcross.html?_r=1
.

3.
“Afghan Security Worse in a Decade: UN,”
ABC News
, February 24, 2011,
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/02/24/3147163.htm
.

4.
See Nir Rosen,
Aftermath: Following the Bloodshed of America’s Wars in the Muslim World
(Nation Books, 2010).

5.
Anatol Lieven, “A Mutiny Grows in Punjab,”
National Interest
, March/April 2011,
http://nationalinterest.org/article/mutiny-grows-punjab-4889
.

6.
The fullest discussion of this critically important material is by Fred Branfman, who had exposed the grotesque U.S. war against the peasants of northern Laos at the time; “Wikileaks Exposes the Danger of Pakistan’s Nukes,”
Truthdig
, January 13, 2011,
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/wikileaks_exposes_the_danger_of_pakistans_nukes_20110113/
.

7.
“James Lamont and Farhan Bokhari, “Murder of Pakistani journalist raises awkward questions inside the regime,”
Financial Times
, June 3, 2011,
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/7b440aae-8e08-11e0-bee5-00144feab49a.html#axzz1PwOPdzye
.

8.
Lieven,
Pakistan: A Hard Country
(Public Affairs, 2011).

9.
Jane Perlez, “Pakistan’s Chief of Army Fights to Keep His Job,”
New York Times,
June 15, 2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/16/world/asia/16pak-istan.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&hp
.

10.
Eric Margolis, “Osama’s Ghost,”
American Conservative,
May 20, 2011,
http://www.amconmag.com/blog/osamas-ghost/
.

11.
Anonymous (Michael Scheuer),
Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror
(Washington DC: Potomac, 2004).

12.
Noam Chomsky,
9-11
(New York: Seven Stories Press 2001) 45–46.

13.
Armand Toprani and Richard Moss, “Filling the Three-Year Gap: Nixon, Allende, and the White House Tapes, 1971-73,”
Passport: The Newsletter of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations
41, no. 3 (2011): 4–5.

14.
David Schmitz,
Thank God They’re on Our Side
(Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1999).

15.
Lubna Z. Qureshi,
Nixon, Kissinger, and Allende: U.S. Involvement in the 1973 Coup in Chile
(Landham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009).

16.
John Coatsworth, “The Cold War in Central America, 1975–1991,” in
History of the Cold War
Vol. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2010).

17.
Harold James, “International Order after the Financial Crisis,”
International Affairs
87, no. 3 (2011): 525–537.

18.
The first war on terror was declared by the Reagan administration, which came into office announcing that a primary focus of foreign policy would be state-directed international terrorism, “the plague of the modern age,” “a return to barbarism in our time,” and so on. The impressive rhetoric had considerable merit, though not exactly as intended. The toll of Reagan’s war on terror included hundreds of thousands of corpses in Central America, over a million in Angola and Mozambique where Reagan was strongly supporting the apartheid South African regime in its defense against “one of the more notorious terrorist groups” in the world (1988, Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress), tens of thousands in the Middle East, and much else. All dispatched to the memory hole along with other matters of little consequence.

19.
I know of no comprehensive study, but it seems quite clear that reactions were considerably different in the West and the Global South, where events of little consequence tend to be remembered. The remarks that follow are adapted from my comments shortly after the assassination, at
http://www.zcommunications.org/there-is-much-more-to-say-by-noam-chomsky
.

20.
Yochi Dreazen, Aamer Madhani, and Marc Ambinder, “Goal Was Never to Capture bin Laden; The Navy SEALs Knew Their Mission was to Kill the al Qaeda Leader, Not Take Him Alive,”
The Atlantic
, May 3, 2011,
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/05/goal-was-never-to-capture-bin-laden/238330/
.

21.
Geoffrey Robertson, “Bin Laden Should Have Been Captured, Not Killed,”
Daily Beast
accessed through Yahoo! News, accessed on June 23, 2011,
http://news.yahoo.com/s/dailybeast/20110503/ts_dailybeast/13863_osamabinladendeathwhyheshouldhavebeencapturednotkilled_1
.

22.
Eric Alterman, “Bin Gotten,”
The Nation
, May 23, 2011.

23.
Robertson,
Daily Beast
, 2011.

24.
Margolis,
American Conservative
, 2011.

25.
Walter Pincus, “Mueller Outlines Origin, Funding of Sept. 11 Plot,”
Washington Post
, June 6, 2002.

26.
Fawaz A. Gerges,
The Far Enemy: Why Jihad Went Global
(Cambridge, 2005, 2009); Gerges,
Journey of the Jihadist: Inside Muslim Militancy
(Harcourt, 2006).

27.
Haroon Siddique, “Iraq inquiry: Saddam posed very limited threat to UK, ex-MI5 chief says,”
Guardian
, July 20, 2010,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/jul/20/iraq-inquiry-saddam-mi5-chief
.

28.
The preceding four quotes can be cited in “The International Tribunal for Germany: Contents of the Nuremberg Trials Collection,”
The Avalon Project: Documents in Law, History, and Diplomacy
, 2008,
http://avalon.law.yale.edu/subject_menus/imt.asp
.

29.
Associate Attorney General Joe D. Whitley, “Exclusion Proceeding for Orlando Bosch Avila,” U.S. Department of Justice, file A28 851 622, A11 861 810.

30.
Graham Allison, “How to Stop Nuclear Terror,”
Foreign Affairs
, January/February 2004.

31.
Robertson,
Daily Beast
, 2011.

9-11

1.
Not Since the War of 1812

Based on an interview with
Il Manifesto
(Italy), September 19, 2001.

Q: The fall of the Berlin Wall didn’t claim any victims, but it did profoundly change the geopolitical scene. Do you think that the attacks of 9-11 could have a similar effect?

CHOMSKY:
The fall of the Berlin Wall was an event of great importance and did change the geopolitical scene, but not in the ways usually assumed, in my opinion. I’ve tried to explain my reasons elsewhere and won’t go into it now.

The horrifying atrocities of September 11 are something quite new in world affairs, not in their scale and character, but in the target. For the United States, this is the first time since the War of 1812 that the national territory has been under attack, or even threatened. Many commentators have brought up a Pearl Harbor analogy, but that is misleading. On December 7, 1941, military bases in two U.S. colonies were attacked—not the national territory, which was never threatened. The U.S. preferred to call Hawaii a “territory,” but it was in effect a colony. During the past several hundred years the U.S. annihilated the
indigenous population (millions of people), conquered half of Mexico (in fact, the territories of indigenous peoples, but that is another matter), intervened violently in the surrounding region, conquered Hawaii and the Philippines (killing hundreds of thousands of Filipinos), and, in the past half century particularly, extended its resort to force throughout much of the world. The number of victims is colossal. For the first time, the guns have been directed the other way. That is a dramatic change.