9-11-06, 8:57 am
The Bush administration retained its dubious hold on the presidency in 2004 by manipulating fears of international terrorism and hopes to do the same thing in the congressional elections this year, when polls show that the public is either opposed to or uneasy with virtually all of its domestic positions and increasingly opposed to its disastrous war in Iraq.
Today, ABC, is “celebrating” the fifth anniversary of the attacks with what, if the excerpts from it are a fair representation, a crude propaganda miniseries blaming the Clinton administration, its National Security Advisor Sandy Berger, and other “weak” liberals, for failing to hunt down and kill Osama bin Laden, failing to use the military to fight “international terrorism,” failing to be either Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush.
There is much that appears to be sinister in this new miniseries, and the Democratic Party, along with various progressive organizations, has mobilized a national campaign against it. Bill Clinton and others have called for its withdrawal, which is very doubtful, and many commentators, including Sandy Berger and others portrayed in the miniseries, have come forward with statements that The Path to 9/11 distorts situations and invents statements that were never made to create a completely false impression of events..
This question is important because most Americans learned of the attacks through television and the distinctions that television makes between even unanalyzed fact and fiction has been so blurred over the years as to make fictionalized accounts of real events a staple of popular television series and sensationalized and semi-fictionalized news accounts a staple of popular news programs.
I saw the September 11 attacks on television the way most Americans did. I had gotten up and was eating some breakfast, preparing to go to work, when the pictures of the first attack came. Then the second attack and I, like millions asked how the air force could not shoot the plane down. I didn't see President George Bush for a long time, or hear any real explanation, except the fragments pouring forth on television. Bill Clinton wasn't president and Sandy Berger wasn't National Security Advisor.
As an historian, I knew that this was the first major foreign attack on U.S. soil since either the war of 1812 or the Civil War, depending on whether you consider the Confederate States of America a foreign power, but the government seemed to be more interested in protecting itself than the country. There was no Abraham Lincoln standing tough on Fort Sumter, no Franklin Roosevelt addressing both houses of Congress and rallying the nation with his “Day that will live in Infamy” speech on December 8, 1941, and, for that matter, no Winston Churchill rallying Britain during that Battle of Britain and no Joseph Stalin speaking in Red Square to millions on November 7, 1941, the twenty fourth anniversary of the Soviet revolution, calling upon the Soviet people to fight a war for the destruction of fascism and the liberation of all peoples under its yoke as millions of Nazi troops were within miles of Moscow. Only a government running around like a chicken without a head, a president reading to school children in Florida, and the most expensive military force in human history, failing to protect U.S. soil and citizens from nineteen terrorists seizing three commercial airliners in American air space
What was the real path to the September 11 attacks?
Recently, a Serbian friend who had worked in the World Trade Center at the time of the 1993 attack asked this question which every thinking person should have asked on September 11: didn't they know that, having failed, the attackers would strike again? Why weren't they prepared?
My friend left his job and warned others, who failed to warn him. He also was interrogated by the FBI, because he was a Serbian and a supporter of Yugoslavia. Serbians were being demonized at the time because the U.S. government was supporting Bosnian Muslim and Croatian separatists in the dismembering of Yugoslavia, where rightwing “Holy warriors” were fighting on the side the imperialist powers were supporting.
The leaders of the U.S. NATO bloc would probably have preferred that Serbian Yugoslavs were behind the 1993 attack, rather than right-wing Muslim terrorist groups whom they had funded, protected, and hailed as “freedom fighters.' But the truth was soon known, and the Clinton administration, whatever its failings didn't attempt to blame Milosevic and Belgrade for attacks that they had nothing in contrast with Bush who later successfully blamed Saddam Hussein and Baghdad for the September 11 attacks that they had nothing to do with
Eventually, the perpetrators of the 1993 bombing were captured, but this was a news blip that was quickly forgotten. Al Qaeda's activities were also a series of news blips over the years, mentioned when U.S installations were attacked. The Taliban regime crimes against humanity had some coverage in U.S. mass media, thanks largely to the persistent and courage exposes of feminists from many countries, including the U.S., but the connections between both the Taliban and bin Laden's Al Qaeda group and with the Pakistani and U.S. intelligence services in the war against the Communist led Afghan government and its Soviet allies in the 1980s was non-existent. This however was not because of “liberal weakness” but simply because the U.S. government wasn't used to taking seriously former assets who turned against it.
In effect, people had been prepared not to understand what had happened by a media which doesn't itself understand because it cannot ask analytical questions about anything important and is always, even on a dark day like September 11th, in the business of peddling images for there commercial and ideological value, never even trying to connect up the dots. Any electorate virtually anywhere else with a serious free media and free elections would have swept the Republicans out of office in 2002 and Bush in 2004.
Since the attacks we have been bombarded with “terrorism experts” who tell us nothing, military consultants trotted out to give us battle plans that are more in the tradition of fantasy football. We are given the names of Al Qaeda leaders, taught how to spell Shiite and Sunni, and quickly led away from looking at the hundreds of millions of people live in the countries that stretch from South Asia to North Africa. Reactionary movements at were with the secular world are called “Radical Islam” and counter posed to a “moderate” Islam (bad Muslims vs. good Muslims). In the old cold war language, we are supporting “moderates” against “extremists.”(even though most of the world sees both Bush and bin Laden as extremists).
Since not even Dr. Strangelove would connect groups like Al Qaeda with Communists, Socialists or any left group, the administration has now found it convenient to use terms like “Islamic fascism” and a “new kind of fascism” to characterize groups like Al Qaeda and the Lebanese Party of God aka Hezbollah, which is the pot calling the kettle black.
Actually, I might agree that these groups can legitimately be called “clerical fascist” but I would add that a great many of the governments that the U.S. supported in Latin America, particularly Stroessner in Paraguay and Pinochet in Chile, could legitimately be called secular fascist in their formal ideology and policies, not to mention Francisco Franco, whom Hitler and Mussolini put into power in the 1930s and the Eisenhower administration aided in exchange for military bases in the 1950s. And that by no means exhausts the list. But they are hardly new. Also, if there is a “new kind of fascism,” one might see aspects of it in the Bush administration, where the militarist and imperialist mindset of fascism and vilification of critics as traitors and subversives is trotted out by functionaries all ethnic and religious backgrounds, a sort of “ecumenical fascism” open to all which was not true of any fascist movement or state in the past.
In the late 1930s, Freda Kirchwey publisher of the Nation, responded to Franklin Roosevelt's comment about a Central American dictator, “he's a Son of a Bitch but He's Our Son of a Bitch,” by calling the dictator a “midget Hitler” whom the U.S. government thought it could safely use but who eventually would ally himself with the big Hitler. U.S. foreign policy in the cold war period was to support many such extremists through the world, both secular and in the Islamic world from the late 1970s, clerical.
In the end, Freda Kirchwey's warning proved to be true. Regimes the U.S supported in the cold war period turned on and attacked the U.S., not through an alliance with a great power like Nazi Germany, but through funding from the clerical reactionary Saudi Arabian ruling class and aid from the reactionary clerically based military dictatorship in Pakistan. In the final years of the cold war, the clerical fascist Taliban state in Afghanistan in which the “Jihadis” (Holy Warriors aka freedom fighters aka post-1991 terrorists) largely came into existence with CIA, Pakistani ISI funding, training, and protection.
Television did tell us the facts that the suicide bombers were mostly Saudi Arabians, bin Laden himself was a Saudi from one of the world's richest families, and had led thousands of Saudi volunteers in fighting a U.S. approved “holy war” in Afghanistan. And we soon learned that the bin Laden family were given protected plane rides out of the U.S. while poor Muslims were picked up and held in preventive detention for praying at the wrong Mosque at the wrong time and millions of Americans were inconvenienced in varying degrees by the general disruption of air travel.
Then there were the revelations of the bin Laden family's extensive Texas oil connections, involvement in the Carlyle Group in which George Bush I and other figures in his administration received large financial rewards, and the generally warm relations between the bin Ladens and the Bushes. But few dared connect the dots: If Bush had been a liberal Democrat, even if he had been Clinton, he would, given the political climate that has existed U.S. ruling circles since the 1980s, have been quickly impeached along with his Vice President and have possibly faced a prison sentence as the Bush bin Laden connections would have been covered at least as extensively as Whitewater or Paula Jones allegations.
But Indian, French and other international sources which contended that bin Laden had worked closely with the CIA were almost completely invisible in U.S. media (the CIA had been more interested in denying its connections with its rogue former “asset,” bin laden, since he turned on the U.S. after the overthrow of the Soviet state, no one followed up bin Laden's CIA and U.S. connections through the Afghan war. The blue ribbon panel which investigated the attacks also didn't touch this issue.
Why is this important? Because any intelligence agency with this sort of past connections to the perpetrators of such acts has to be thoroughly investigated for leaks, double agents, former handlers of bin Laden and his associates corrupted into serving as their protectors.
September 11 was the end of a tale that began in Afghanistan, a crucial moment in a long story that had its prologue in the U.S. government's cultivation of secular and religious rightists to thwart indigenous Communist and left influence and construct anti-Soviet military alliance systems in many resource rich poor Muslim countries
There was no sweeping investigation of the intelligence agencies and their compromised long-term relationships with the Al Qaeda group. Nor was there even a normal interrogation of bin Laden family members and business associates and their American corporate friends.
Rather than attempt to get at the truth which would permit an informed public to understand and protect itself from the dangers of terrorist attacks, the Bush administration sought to deflect serious investigation, used the government and the media to drum up support for its “war against terrorism” in ways that strengthened both it and the terrorists, and undermined the real security of the nation by wasting hundreds of billions of dollars in the Iraq war, using National Guard units filled with domestic police and fire fighters as an untrained occupation force while their vital public sector security jobs were left vacant.
The Saudi regime is filled with Bin Laden sympathizers and protectors but was proclaimed by Bush a major ally in the “war against terrorism.” Pakistan, where Saudi oil money had long funded right-wing Muslim religious schools that were recruiting grounds for Al Qaeda and whose borders had served as base areas for the assault on Afghanistan in the 1980s has also been praised as an indispensable ally, even though it was a theocratic state founded out of Muslim majority regions of India with the connivance of British imperialists in order to prevent a united independent India from coming into existence, and its government had long backed the Taliban and had supported right-wing Muslim terrorist groups against India in Kashmir.
Bush administration spokespersons and supporters are now claiming that the Republican Party is strong on terrorism and those who criticize it are weak. the truth, however, is that the Bush administration' handling of the attack and its aftermath were a total disaster. After the attack, the administration shifted into its Ronald Reagan B movie mode, launching an all out campaign to kill or capture bin Laden. In the 1980s, Reagan and Bush I personalized conflicts between states in terms of attacking and attempting to eliminate figures like Khadaffi of Libya (today off the terrorism and on the tourist list); Noriega of Panama (today the only head of state of a foreign country serving time in a Florida federal prison); Khomeini of Iran (today long dead and replaced by an individual who represents the most reactionary sectors of his Islamic Revolution); and Saddam Hussein (right-wing dictator and former CIA asset transformed by the magic of propaganda into the friend and supporter of religious terrorists who were as friendly to him as they were to Clinton and the two Bush presidents).
Capturing or killing bin Laden, which the administration has failed to do, would not eliminate the rich reactionary circles in Saudi Arabia and other countries who fund clerical groups to both augment their wealth and power and redistribute the oil wealth of the region more to themselves. Only supporting secular progressive mass forces, not political stooges, is the only way to defeat the class forces that represent the method and “rational core” behind bin laden and likeminded groups.
It is doubtful that any capitalist government could do this, even one similar to Franklin Roosevelt's in the U.S., but it is impossible for a rightwing Republican government to do anything of the kind. The weak caretaker government in Afghanistan cannot carry forward the land and education and social reforms begun by the Communist-led government of Afghanistan in the 1980s and only those policies can confront and defeat what the Taliban, which by any standard deserved to be called a “clerical fascist” state, represented.
What would a progressive policy concerning Pakistan be? Certainly not the traditional U.S. policy of arming Pakistan and denying complicity in its attacks against India, not to mention the mass rape and murder that the Pakistani military dictatorship inflicted on the Bengali Muslim population of what was then East Pakistan (today Bangladesh) during the Nixon administration, in return for support for every cold war maneuver against the Soviet Union and as an obedient rightwing club against a developing non-aligned India with a significant Communist political presence.
Today, Pakistani border areas are once more the staging ground for attacks against Afghanistan by Taliban forces, today against a government installed by the U.S. And Bush administration policy planners advocate increasing support for the Musharaff military dictatorship as a counter-weight to “Muslim extremists” even though his government is filled with allies and enablers of those armed rightwing groups, as every Pakistani government has been since the Zia regime began to “aid” rightwing Muslims in Afghanistan in the late 1970s.
The Bush administration's policy of working out nuclear pacts with India and encouraging both the Indians and the Pakistanis to beg for U.S. military favors isn't any better, since, whatever some Indians may think, it is merely a policy of playing both states against each other, encouraging military confrontations rather than addressing the common ethno cultural heritage that unites both and working to assist those progressive forces in India who would advocate India helping Pakistan in its social-economic development and integration into a larger South Asian political economic federation.
The path to the September 11 attack was the failure of a long-term foreign policy of supporting rightist forces through the world which created political and social vacuums by marginalizing progressive and secular forces in many poor countries and eventually gave these rightist forces the opportunity to turn on their enablers and seek to control the wealth and power of their own regions for themselves, not for their peoples.
By invading Iraq, fighting what are expensive neo-colonial wars, the Bush administration has failed totally to fight groups that are organized internationally in small units, have funding sources and recruitment centers in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, among other “favored nations,” and have used the disastrous military intervention in Iraq to strengthen their global recruitment.
Contrary to the ABC miniseries, international intelligence and police cooperation, not unilateral military invasions and occupations, are necessary to destroy these terrorist networks and programs of international relief and rehabilitation of poor countries (to use the name of the United Nations ill-fated postwar Relief and Rehabilitation Agency, UNRRA) are the foundations of a global security policy.
ABC's Path to September 11, based on the excerpts that have been presented, not only gets major facts wrong but distorts the overall context and the social relationships necessary for understanding the events. If the accounts of it are true, it is a series that both GW Bush and Osama bin Laden will take comfort from, since its “Send in the cavalry, get Geronimo” Hollywood message keeps Americans from understanding the causes of the September 11 attacks and the necessity of defeating the Bush administration in order to really protect U.S. and global security.
