Today is the day after the eleventh anniversary of the September 11 attacks and the 39th anniversary of the overthrow of Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity Government of Socialists, Communists, and liberals in Chile. Mass media this morning is filled with comments about attacks against U.S. embassies in Egypt and Libya and the murder of a U.S. ambassador in Libya. I will get to that later, but first, let me write about the two September 11ths
While the two might seem to be disconnected to most people, they are connected by an ideology, anti-Communism, and a specific agency, the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States
We know a good deal about the overthrow of the Allende government, the role of the Nixon administration, Nixon and Henry Kissinger specifically, in working with U.S. corporations and CIA assets to cripple the Chilean economy, assassinate democratic leaders of the military who would not do their bidding, and finally aid abet and then financially subsidize and protect the government of General Augusto Pinochet as he directed the coup and mass killing against the Allende regime and instituted a regime that most of the world compared to European fascism.
But for Nixon and Kissinger what mattered was the destruction of a “Communist government” which had “no right” to exist, regardless of the fact that the Chilean people had dared to elect it.
There wasn’t too much blowback, the CIA term going back to the 1950s for the unintended negative consequences of assassinating political leaders, overthrowing governments, invading countries, from the Chilean cold war “victory.” A few American supporters of the Allende government lost their lives in Chile. An American citizen, Ronnie Moffitt, secretary to Orlando L’etelier, a Chilean socialist leader who Pinochet had in response to global pressure released from a concentration camp, was murdered in Washington along with L’etelier in a car bombing arranged by agents of the DINA, Pinochet's Gestapo.
But virtually all of the victims of what many historians regard as the most brutal regime in Latin American history were Chileans, those initially tortured and murdered by the regime, those imprisoned or “disappeared subsequently, and of course the whole Chilean people, who saw their unions abolished, their social security pensions privatized, and all their social subsidies and democratic rights destroyed by a government that combined the terroristic political dictatorship of Hitler with the “free market” economic policies of Milton Friedman.
The war in Afghanistan, leading eventually to September 11, 2001, was also a victory for anti-Communist ideology and the Central Intelligence Agency, but one with an enormous blowback.
While September 11, 1973, is largely erased in the U.S., September 11, 2001 is the source of speeches, gatherings, rituals of remembrance and mourning. But the relevant history has also been largely erased through theses rituals, the serious questions rarely asked by anyone with access to mainstream media, even though the record contains much of the answers.
A brief timeline will help
1979—faced with the clerical revolution in Iran, President Jimmy Carter supports National Security advisor Brzezinski’s proposal to unleash the CIA to support rightwing Muslim guerillas, fighting against the Communist led government in Afghanistan, which had taken power in a coup a year before. These guerillas are already receiving support from the rightwing government of General Zia in Pakistan, who had himself seized power in a very bloody coup earlier and had identified himself with ultra right Muslim religious factions and policies in Pakistan. Brzezinski hopes for a Soviet military intervention that will give the Soviets “their Vietnam”.
1979-1989---- U.S. aid, small at first, grows to billions under the Reagan administration. Osama bin Laden, scion of the wealthiest non royal family in Saudi Arabia, works closely with both Pakistani ISI (CIA style intelligence agency albeit with more independence) and U.S. CIA as both fund-raiser and logistical planner for the “guerilla war”
An estimated 50,000 volunteer “freedom fighters” from various Muslim countries are trained in Pakistani-afghan border camps to infiltrate Afghanistan as part of the “Jihad” or Holy War against “atheistic communism” and the “Godless Soviet Union.” Fighters are portrayed in the U.S. and NAT0 bloc countries as heroes fighting the “evil Soviet empire.” CIA is aware of but ignores their promises to fight holy wars against “Zionist Jews, Christian Crusaders, and “the impure immoral Western civilization profaning Islam.”
U.S. and Soviets broker a withdrawal leaving greatly weakened Communist led government still in power in Kabul. bin Laden forms Al Quada (the base) from among the foreign volunteers to continue the “holy war” when they return to their countries.
1989-2001--- George HW Bush administration ignores all attempts to establish some kind of coalition government that would stabilize Afghanistan and extends greatly military aid to anti-Communist forces to destroy the weakened Communist led Kabul government, which falls in 1992, amid mass murder and mass rape by warlords, who continue to fight each other. Bin Laden proclaims in aftermath of first Gulf War a “holy war” against the U.S. and its allies for “profaning” Muslim holy sites, and inflicting the corruption and immorality of secular “Western” society in and on Muslim countries He shifts Al Qaeda operations to Sudan and begins to raise funds and develop logistics for attacks against the these enemies on their soil.
First attack on U.S. soil on World Trade center carried out by rightwing Muslim elements in 1994, acknowledged by U.S. government but not seen seriously as something that might be repeated.
Pakistani supported and Al Quada affiliated ultra right Muslim “Taliban” comes to power in Afghanistan in 1995 and establishes one of the most repressive regimes on earth, especially in its brutal suppression of all women’s rights, the right to work, the right to gain basic literacy, the right exist outside of male-family clerical control.
Al Qaeda attacks against both European and U.S. targets mount as U.S. and CIA especially begin to realize the blowback effects of their former “assets.” Bin Laden sets up operations in Afghanistan as counterattacks against him are half hearted at best. After all, bin Laden is not a Communist or a socialist revolutionary of any kind and the whole post WWII U.S. intelligence-military and political police apparatus was established after WWII to fight organizations and movements defined as Communist, socialist, revolutionary left.
U.S. energy companies also want a pipeline through Afghanistan from former Soviet Republics, Pakistan continues to recognize and support Taliban government, and bin Laden has many powerful friends among the Saudi 1% not to mention the bin Laden family, which has formally disowned Osama. The bin Laden family in turn has many friends and connections with the U.S. 1%, especially with Texas oil families, including the Bush family.
Al Quada agents, all from Saudi Arabia and other U.S. allied Muslim countries, legally enter the U.S., take “flying lessons” at Florida schools with minimum checks, and carry through their hijacking and attacks. The Bush administration handles the day disastrously.
After the first tower is hit, nothing is done by the air force to guard the second tower from attack. Bush and administration officials seek to protect themselves. Only the heroism of civilian passengers in bringing down a hijacked plane prevents an even greater tragedy.
The Bush administration, having come to power through a stolen election, uses the attack, the first major attack on U.S. soil since the war of 1812, to advance its domestic and foreign policy agenda, heightening rather than reducing fear, using the attack over its two terms to proclaim an “opended war against terrorism” as a permanent replacement for the cold war. It proceeds to double the military budget, pass the Patriot Act, potentially the most dangerous anti-civil liberties legislation in U.S. history, and launch an invasion of Iraq, a larger and more important nation than Afghanistan, on a series of crude lies connecting the Iraqi regime to Al Qaeda, to the procurement of nuclear weapons and other “weapons of mass destruction.”
Postscripts and Unanswered Questions
First, when will there be a serious investigation of the CIA’s direct and indirect involvement with bin Laden until the first Gulf War and its involvement with its Pakistani counterpart, the ISI, which was the major supporter(along with Saudi money) of the Taliban government and Al Qaeda until 2001? What did the CIA know about Pakistani ISI complicity in the hiding of bin Laden in plain sight in Pakistan while the Bush administration gave billions to the Pakistani military dictatorship to fight “terrorists” ?
Why did the U.S. military, primed by decades of cold war military buildups, with the fastest fighter planes in the world, to shoot down enemy planes and missiles, fail to even try to respond after the attack on the first tower? Why were members of the bin Laden family given royal carpet treatment as they left the U.S. instead of facing even elemental interrogation while Americans of the Muslim religion were seized and held without warrants because of the Mosque they attended?
The war continues to rage in Afghanistan, a potential trap today for the Obama administration. Bin Laden is dead but all sorts of Al Qaeda spinoffs and the domestic spinoffs from the war on terrorism in the U.S., the department of Homeland Security, the various state, city and local anti-terrorism forces are still around.
Saudi Arabia is still around, using its oil dollar wealth to promote its brand of rightwing Muslim religion among Muslims through the world and still an “ally" of the U.S. government. Pakistan, while the Obama administration has pursued tougher policies toward it than any of its predecessors, is still around, undermining the anti-Taliban forces in Afghanistan, sponsoring rightwing Muslim terrorist attacks against India, and possessing nuclear weapons.
History has a way of working that way. If you don’t ask relevant questions about the past, don’t learn from the failed policies of the past, those policies live on in the present.
The Pinochet regime is gone from Chile and a constitutional government has been restored, although the scars run deep. The government the Bush administration established in Afghanistan, a corrupt government without the formal savagery of either its warlord or Taliban predecessors, but with no serious social program to provide security for, much less raise the living standards of the people, retains the support of the Obama administration, as the war rages on, with the old bases and camps on the Pakistani-Afghani border and the various tribal groups that the ISI-CIA organizers used in the 1980s now used against U.S. and NAT0 forces
But blowback continues. In the 1980s, Reagan used "cowboy" diplomacy to target various "rogue state leaders," including Khaddaffi of Libya, who clearly supported terrorists, that is, those who murder civilian bystanders to gain attention and instill panic. Yesterday, the U.S. ambassador was murdered in Libya, devastated by a civil war and filled today with lawlessness and violence. Egypt has a clerical oriented rightwing government today, and attacks were made on the U.S. embassy, the flag torn down and a religious banner put up, according to press reports. We should all realize that these actions are aimed primarily at Egyptians and Libyans, to win support and/or inspire fear. They may also be an attempt by these rightist groups to hurt the Obama administration, since that administration, even with all of its war in Afghanistan, offers much more hope for the economic and social progress that would undercut their support than any Romney-Ryan government. The first priority for Americans is not to be provoked, not to over react, because that is exactly what the perpetrators of these acts want and need.
If the Obama administration wins the coming election, we should demand that it start to seriously ask these questions and begin seriously to restructure the U.S. intelligence and military interventionist policies, repeal the Patriot Act and rethink the open-ended “war against terrorism.”
