12-19-05, 9:55 am
Immediately after the September 11 attacks I wrote an article titled Who Is Osama bin Laden, which appeared on HistoryNewsNetwork. I contended that bin Laden was an old CIA asset whose group had come out of the CIA funded and armed 'holy war' against the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan and their Soviet allies in the 1980s. After publication, I was asked to participate in a Public Radio program out of Seattle. The moderator pretty much sneered at my article, citing CIA denials that they had ever had much to do with bin Laden, and then went on to more conventional, centrist analyses.
I mention this only because bin Laden’s relationship with the CIA and the role that the U.S. government played in sponsoring his activities as the organizer and regional fund-raiser for Saudi and other Arab volunteer 'holy warriors' then praised as 'freedom fighters' was common knowledge internationally.
Now it is common knowledge that there are secret courts, detention programs, searches, seizures and wiretappings of U.S. citizens without warrant based on what are essentially secret determinations of probable cause, meaning that evidence about their connection to terrorism or their involvement with any group deemed an 'aid international terrorism' is kept secret.
The Pentagon has already entered into investigating domestic peace groups and there is apparently the greatest job expansion in police agents and spying since the late 1960s. Then at some demonstrations the police agents and provocateurs, as in the 1968 Chicago Democratic convention represented a substantial group among the protesters. The following year the police agent in the Black Panther Party who gave the FBI the detailed information used by the Chicago police to launch the raid that murdered Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark had actually been named director of security for the Chicago Black Panther chapter. The Bush administration seems in its police state policies to be intent upon subjecting the American people to what in the old Lil Abner comic strip was called a double whammy. First it has responded to terrorist attacks, which are now and essentially always have been a police problem with massive military force that has cost thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars but has not affected real terrorist groups, except to take the heat off them and give them time to regroup and recruit more followers. Secondly, it has exploited a climate of fear against its domestic enemies, which also gives real terrorist groups who are centered abroad in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, two protected allies of this administration, time to maneuver
In Czarist Russia, a government also rooted in hereditary privilege that never pretended its citizens had any rights to begin with, engaged in far-reaching police state actions in the name of fighting 'terrorism,' (the first groups called 'terrorist' where the anarchist groups which plotted assassination of the Czar and other high government officials).
Although they had no parliament to pass a 'Patriot Act,' the Czar’s political police employed an army of informers and provocateurs, some of whom rose to important positions in revolutionary groups. These policies drove groups deeper underground and intensified the existing social struggle, which was never about 'terrorists' as such. For their part, Lenin and the Bolsheviks repudiated terrorism as a self-defeating tactic that would either alienate or discourage mass action and serve as excuse for the regime to attack more ferociously all workers and democratic organizations and groups – points that remain valid today.
The peace groups that are under attack not only have nothing to do with any terrorist organization but are in effect enemies of both all forms of terrorism and the policies which have strengthened Al Qaeda and similar groups, who need Bush as much as he needs them.
It is common knowledge that the Iraq occupation has strengthened Al Qaeda and enabled them to recruit fighters against the U.S in Iraq, although no nation is directly backing them with massive funds and weapons as the Reagan administration and the CIA backed bin Laden in the 1980s.
It is also common knowledge that an administration which literally sweats corruption from every pore and has lied and cheated on a level which has greatly surpassed even the Nixon administration can’t be trusted to carry out searches, seizures, bugging and preventive detentions based on secret tribunals that it has established. What government that specializes in denouncing its critics for aiding terrorists and say with a straight face that it can be trusted to use this far-reaching police power in a fair and prudent way.
There is a joke about the oppressed Jewish minority in Odessa at the start of World War I. Jewish people were brought to a theater from which they had been previously segregated to hear a speech from a 'Jewish deputy' or official Jewish stooge of the anti-Semitic regime to rally support for the war effort. The Jewish deputy said, 'Brothers, will we stand up and defend our protector, the little father of Mother Russia, Our Czar,' and everybody laughed.
The Bush administration is in effect saying to the working people of America: you should support us because we have the right to spy on you without probable cause, lock you up without probable cause, get thousands of our troops killed and wounded in the name of a 'war against terrorism' in which virtually all of the targets and victims, both citizens and residents, both here and abroad, are not terrorists or members of terrorist organizations. No one, however, is laughing.
There are some positive signs, including the Senate showing some opposition to the renewing of the Patriot Act and Bush’s 'retreat' in supporting McCain’s anti-torture amendment. It is a comment on how sordid things have become when a conservative Goldwater Republican from Arizona like John McCain is the spokesperson for moderation because he does not pander to the religious right, opposes corruption in government, and contends that the U.S. should formally reject the use of torture. While McCain likes to compare himself to Theodore Roosevelt, he may be a bit more like the conservative general, Charles De Gaulle, who refused to go along with his fellow conservatives, Pierre Laval and Marshall Henri Petain in forming a pro-Nazi collaborationist government in 1940.
Even some Republicans are perhaps realizing that the administration’s blank check open ended 'war against terrorism' is seen more and more by Americans as a smokescreen for its disastrous policies in virtually all areas of life.
The left should come forward with a program to challenge repressive administration now, while fighting against the renewal of the 'Patriot Act.' Let me conclude this essay with a few suggestions for such a program – suggestions which may spark some disagreements and criticisms.
First, the 'Patriot Act' should not be renewed just as the Alien and Sedition Acts were not renewed over two hundred years ago because it has done nothing but undermine the civil liberties of U.S. citizens and residents in a far-reaching way without doing much of anything against real terrorists. The administration’s argument that there has not been any new 9/11 attacks is rather like a doctor who has put you on a painful treatment that hasn’t addressed your illness and has told you to be grateful to be alive, and that you would be dead if any other treatment were tried.
The Department of Homeland Security, which has been a disaster, should be abolished and its functions, which previously existed through the Department of the Interior, should be restored to the Department of the Interior.
FEMA, which has been treated with contempt by this administration through massive under-funding, poor reorganization under Homeland Security, and staffed by a pathetic incompetents, should be reorganized and greatly expanded so that the horror of New Orleans will not only not be repeated and that the reconstruction of New Orleans will be carried out in a rapid and effective way.
The role of the National Guard, which was meant to deal with domestic crises like Hurricane Katrina and civil disturbances, should be clearly spelled out. We should prevent what this administration has done: send large numbers of the Guard to Iraq to participate in a deadly occupation for which they had no training and experience. Deployment to the war has removed them from their civilian jobs to the detriment of communities through the country, since significant numbers are police, fire, and other important civil servants.
Abroad the U.S, should actively oppose the military dictatorship in Pakistan, whose 'support' the American people need as much as it needs the Bush administration, and begin to work with both India and the United Nations for regional development and reconciliation. India, with all of its troubles, is a far more advanced country than Pakistan and Pakistan itself is a section of India carved out by British Imperialists and Muslim separatists. Regional economic development and demilitarization are in the interests of the American people and the world’s peoples, not U.S. military bases to protect oil supplies in a wildly unstable region where the bases really can’t protect the oil anyway.
Right-wingers in the U.S. have begun to throw around the phrase 'Islamo Fascism,' to talk tough, but since much of what they support in the United States is fascist itself, they really don’t know what they are talking about. The term fascist, or rather clerical fascist, has a legitimate meaning I think, when applied to groups like Al Qaeda, as it does to various Christian, Jewish, and Hindu groups that advocate 'pure states' and the use of violence to expel people of other faiths or secular institutions.
But how does one fight fascism at home and abroad? By denouncing selectively certain clerical fascist groups who have attacked the U.S. while protecting their progenitors in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan,, in the Bush style, or building united opposition to fascists at home and abroad, from the Pakistani supported terrorists in Kashmir to the rightwing death squads in Columbia and other Latin American countries to the dictatorships of the Right that use some mix of Fascist ideology, national and/or religious chauvinism, anti- working class repression and police state terrorism.
As for the kind of Islamic clerical fascism represented by Al Qaeda, it is important to understand that there are liberal schools of Islam, which is a scholarly religion, centered historically in Egypt and other countries. Supporting individuals connected with those schools of thought actively in Muslim countries as against the ultra-right Muslim schools that have been set up throughout the Islamic world with Saudi money might be a reasonable policy. (For Bush, however, that might be like his administration embracing Quakers as against Pat Robertson and his Christian Coalition minions.)
Action to support the implementation of the 1948 United Nations Charter on Human Rights in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, the establishment of a United Nations energy authority to both develop global energy conservation and alternative energy policies is also a long-range global solution. Such an authority might establish international public control of the oil resources of the Persian Gulf away from the feudal regimes and the transnational oil companies as the Tennessee Valley Authority in the 1930s developed the electricity producing facilities of the Tennessee River against the interests of the private power companies but in the interests of the people.
The people of the Persian Gulf and the Middle East generally, would benefit from such a development and their social and economic progress would further weaken the influence of reactionary and clerical fascist elements among them. As a short-range policy, the U.S. government should in cooperation with the other rich countries act to confiscate the funds of Al Qaeda and its allies even if that means acting to prevent countries like Switzerland from acquiring bank capital through laws that protect corrupt and criminal individuals, corporations and organizations.
These are radical suggestions but for the American people and the people of the world they are serious suggestions for a war against terrorist groups and the social causes of terrorism, without 'Patriot Acts,' 'Homeland Security Departments,' and a reactionary government encouraging police state methods to protect its own power.
--Reach Norman Markowitz at pa-letters@politicalaffairs.net.
