[This is a work-in-progress that will be regularly updated and available on my home-page
http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/kellner.html
It continues the work done in my books The
Persian Gulf TV War. Boulder, Col.: Westview Press, 1992, and Grand
Theft 2000. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001.
It is an experiment in writing contemporary
history as it evolves, circulating a first-draft condensed from various media
sources. As more material comes out, I plan to keep up with new information
and various interpretations of the emerging Terror War and New Barbarism to
help produce an eventual book on the topic, one that documents the conjunction
of Bush’s theft of Election 2000, the September 11 terror attacks, and
the consequent Bush administration responses and their global ramifications.]
On September 11, 2001 terrorists seized control of an American Airlines flight from Boston to Los Angles and crashed it into the World Trade Center in New York City, followed by a second hijacking and deliberate collision into another WTC Tower within minutes. During the same hour, a third commandeered jetliner hit the Pentagon, while a fourth hijacked plane, possibly destined for a White House crash-landing, went down in Pennsylvania, perhaps brought down by passengers who had learned of the earlier terrorist crimes and who struggled to prevent another calamity.
The world stood transfixed with the graphic videos of the World Trade Center buildings exploding and discharging a great cloud of rubble, while heroic workers struggling to save bodies were themselves victims of unpredictable crashing of the Towers or shifts in the debris. The World Trade Center Towers, the largest in New York City and potent symbol of global capitalism, were down, and the mighty symbol of American military power, the mythically shaped and configured Pentagon, was severely wounded. Terrorists celebrated their victory over the American colossus and the world remained transfixed for days by the media spectacle of “America Under Attack” and reeling from the now highly-feared effects of terrorism.
Momentous historical events, like the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and the subsequent Terror War, test social theories and provide a challenge to give a convincing account of the event and its consequences. They also provide cultural studies an opportunity to trace how political and ideological discourses, propaganda, and mythologies play themselves out in media discourse and representations. Major historical events and media spectacles also provide an opportunity to examine how the broadcast and other dominant media of communication perform or fail to perform their democratic role of providing accurate information and discussion.
In the following analyses, I want first to suggest how certain dominant social theories were put in question during the momentous and world-shaking events of Fall 2001, how highly problematic discourses circulated through the media, and how the media on the whole performed disastrously and dangerously, whipping up war hysteria, while failing to provide a coherent account of what happened, why it happened, and what would count as responsible responses to the terrorist attacks. I then draw upon some historical accounts of U.S. intervention in Afghanistan and the Middle East to provide historical background for the terrorist attacks to help explain why the U.S. was subject to such violent assaults. Subsequent sections describe U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan, the ways that dominate corporate media in the U.S. legitimated military action, the critical discourses and accounts left out of the U.S. corporate media, especially television, and the vicissitudes of Terror War. I argue that a combination of critical social theory and cultural studies can help illuminate the September events, their causes, effects, and importance in shaping the contemporary moment.
Social theories generalize from past experience and provide accounts of historical events or periods that attempt to map, illuminate, and perhaps criticize dominant social relations, institutions, forms, trends, and events of a given epoch. In turn, they can be judged by the extent to which they account for, interpret, and critically assess contemporary conditions, or predict future events or developments. One dominant social theory of the past two decades, Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History (1992) was strongly put into question by the events of September 11 and their aftermath.[1] For Fukuyama, the collapse of Soviet communism and triumph of Western capitalism and democracy in the early 1990s constituted “the end of history.” This signified for him “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” While there may be conflicts in places like the Third World, overall for Fukuyama liberal democracy and market capitalism have triumphed and future struggles will devolve around resolving routine economic and technical problems, and the future will accordingly be rather mundane and boring.
Samuel Huntington polemicizes against Fukuyama’s “one world: euphoria and harmony” model in his The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996). For Huntington, the future holds a series of clashes between “the West” and “the rest.” Huntington rejects a number of other models of contemporary history including a “realist” model, that nation-states are primary players on the world scene and will continue to form alliances and coalitions which will play themselves out in various conflicts, as well as a “chaos” model that detects no discernible order or structure.
Huntington himself claims that the contemporary world is articulated into competing civilizations that are based on irreconcilably different cultures and religions. For Huntington, culture provides unifying and integrating principles of order and harmony and he delineates seven or eight different civilizations which emerge from within certain cultural formations that are likely to come into conflict with each other, including Islam, China, Russia, and the West. While Huntington’s model seems to have some purchase in the currently emerging global encounter with terrorism, and is becoming a new dominant conservative ideology, it tends to overly homogenize both Islam and the West, as well as the other civilizations he depicts. Moreover, his model lends itself to pernicious misuse, and has been deployed to call for and legitimate military retribution against implacable adversarial civilizations by conservative intellectuals like Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Henry Kissinger, and members of the Bush administration.
Huntington’s work provides too essentialist a model that covers over contradictions and conflicts both within the West and within Islam. Both worlds have been divided for centuries into dueling countries, ethnic groups, religious divisions, and complex alliances that have fought fierce wars against each other and that continue to be divided geographically, politically, ideologically, and culturally. Islam itself is a contested terrain and in the current situation there are important attempts to mobilize more moderate forms of Islam and Islamic countries against Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda terror network and Taliban extremism.
Hence, Huntington’s binary model of inexorable conflict between the West and Islam is not only analytically problematic, but covers over the crucial battle within Islam to define the role and nature of the religion in the contemporary world. It also decenters the important challenge for the West to engage the Islamic world in a productive dialogue about religion and modernity and to bring about more peaceful, informed, and mutually beneficial relations between the West and Islam. Positing inexorable conflicts between civilizations may well describe past history and present challenges, but it does not help produce a better future and is thus normatively and politically defective.
Globalization includes a homogenizing neo-liberal market logic and commodification, cultural interaction, and hybridization, and conflict between corporations, nations, blocs, and cultures. Benjamin Barber’s book McWorld vs. Jihad (1996) captures both the homogenizing and conflictual elements of globalization. Barber divides the world into a modernizing, homogenizing, Westernizing, and secular forces of globalization, dominated by multinational corporations, opposed to premodern, fundamentalist, and tribalizing forces at war with the West and modernity. The provocative “Jihad” in the title seems to grasp precisely the animus against the West in Islamic extremism. But “Jihad” scholars argue that the term itself has a complex history in Islam and themselves privilege the more spiritual senses as a struggle for religion and spiritualization, or a struggle within oneself for spiritual mastery. On this view, bin Laden’s militarization of Jihad is itself a distortion of Islam that is contested by mainstream Islam.
Barber’s model also oversimplifies present world divisions and conflicts and does not adequately present the contradictions within the West or the “Jihad” world, although he postulates a dialectical interpenetration of both forces and sees both as opposed to democracy. His book does, however, point to problems and limitations of globalization, noting serious conflicts and opponents, unlike Thomas Friedman’s simplistic dichotomy of The Lexus and the Olive (1999), which suggests that both poles of capitalist luxury and premodern simplicity and roots can be accompanied by the globalization process. In an ode to globalization, Friedman assumes the dual triumph of capitalism and democracy, a la Fukuyama, while Barber demonstrates contradictions and tensions between capitalism and democracy within the New World (Dis)Order, as well as the anti-democratic animus of Jihad.
Dominant dualistic theories that posit a fundamental bifurcation between the West and Islam, and modern and premodern society, are thus analytically suspicious in that they homogenize complex civilizations and cover over differences, hybridizations, contradictions, and conflicts within these cultures. Positing inexorable conflicts between bifurcated blocs a la Huntington and Barber fails to illuminate specific conflicts within the opposing worlds. They also fail to articulate the complexity in the current geopolitical situation, which involves highly multifaceted and intricate differences, interests, and coalitions that shift and evolve in response to changing situations within an overdetermined and constantly evolving historical context. Thus the events of September 11 and their aftermath suggest that critical social theory needs models that account for complexity and the historical roots and vicissitudes of contemporary problems like terrorism rather than abstract theoretical generalizations. Critical social theory also needs to articulate how events like September 11 produce novel historical configurations while articulating both changes and continuities in the present situation.[2]
I will argue in the following section that Chalmers Johnson’s model of “blowback” (2000) provides a more convincing account of the September 11 terrorist attacks that better contextualizes, explains, and even predicts such events and that it also provides cogent suggestions concerning viable and inappropriate responses to global terrorism. Then, I discuss the ways that the September 11 events did or did not create a rupture within history and a new socoi-historical situation.
In the following section, I argue that the causes of the September 11 events and their aftermath are highly complex and involve, for starters, the failure of U.S. intelligence and interventionist foreign policy since the late 1970s, and the policies of the Carter, Reagan, Clinton, and both Bush Administrations. In other words, there is no one cause or faction responsible for the catastrophe, but a wide range of responsibility to be ascribed. Taking account of the history and complexity of the issues involved, I argue that Chalmers Johnson’s model of blowback (2000) provides the most convincing account of how U.S. policy and institutions contributed to producing the worst terrorist crime in U.S. history with destructive consequences still threatening.[3]
The Bush Administrations, the CIA, and Blowback
In this section, I will argue that the events of September 11 can be seen as a textbook example of blowback since bin Laden and the radical Islamic forces associated with the al Qaeda network were supported, funded, trained, and armed by several U.S. administrations and by the CIA. In this reading, the CIA’s catastrophic failure was not only to have not detected the danger of the event and taken action to prevent it, but to have actively contributed to producing the groups who are implicated in the terrorist attacks on the U.S.
The term “blowback” is developed in a book with this title by Chalmers Johnson who writes: “The term ‘blowback,’ which officials of the Central Intelligence Agency first invented for their own internal use, is starting to circulate among students of international relations. It refers to the unintended consequences of policies that were kept secret from the American people. What the daily press reports as the malign acts of ‘terrorists’ or ‘drug lords’ or ‘rogue states’ or ‘illegal arms merchants’ often turn out to be blowback from earlier operations” (2000: 8).
Johnson provides a wealth of examples of blowback from problematic U.S. foreign policy maneuvers and covert actions which had unintended consequences, as when the U.S. became associated with support of terrorist groups or authoritarian regimes in Asia, Latin America, or the Middle East, and its clients turned on their sponsors. For instance, the U.S. helped overthrow a democratically elected government in Iran and install the autocratic Shah. When the Shah was overthrown, militants seized the U.S. embassy and took its inhabitants hostage and since then has maintained hostile, although complex, relationships with the U.S.
In Johnson’s sense, September 11 is a classic example of blowback, in which U.S. policies generated unintended consequences that had catastrophic effects on U.S. citizens, New York, and the American and indeed global economy. As I suggest in the following analysis, U.S. policy in Afghanistan at the end of the Cold War and to the present contributed to the heinous events of September 11. In the useful summary of Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair:
In April of 1978 an indigenous populist coup overthrew the government of Mohammed Daoud, who had formed an alliance with the man the U.S. had installed in Iran, Reza Pahlevi, aka the Shah. The new Afghan government was led by Noor Mohammed Taraki, and the Taraki administration embarked, albeit with a good deal of urban intellectual arrogance on land reform, hence an attack on the opium-growing feudal estates. Taraki went to the UN where he managed to raise loans for crop substitution for the poppy fields.
Taraki also tried to bear down on opium production in the border areas held by fundamentalists, since the latter were using opium revenues to finance attacks on Afghanistan's central government, which they regarded as an unwholesome incarnation of modernity that allowed women to go to school and outlawed arranged marriages and the bride price. Accounts began to appear in the western press along the lines of this from the Washington Post, to the effect that the mujahideen liked to "torture their victims by first cutting off their noses, ears and genitals, then removing one slice of skin after another."
At that time the mujahideen was not only getting money from the CIA but from Libya's Moammar Q'addaffi who sent them $250,000. In the summer of 1979 the U.S. State Department produced a memo making it clear how the U.S. government saw the stakes, no matter how modern minded Taraki might be or how feudal the Muj. It's another passage Nat might read to the grandkids: "The United States' larger interest would be served by the demise of the Taraki-Amin regime, despite whatever set backs this might mean for future social and economic reforms in Afghanistan. The overthrow of the DRA [Democratic Republic of Afghanistan] would show the rest of the world, particularly the Third World, that the Soviets' view of the socialist course of history being inevitable is not accurate."[4]
Interestingly, in a 1998 Le Monde interview President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski had bragged about how he conceived of arming of Islam-extremist militants against the Afghan government as a ploy to draw in the Soviet Union more deeply and thus help destroy their system.[5] What Brzezinksi proudly proclaimed as his contribution to defeat the Soviet Union in the Cold War appears in retrospect as a highly problematic U.S. intervention in the late 1970s that intensified civil war in Afghanistan. Overthrow of the secular and modernizing regime in Afghanistan by Islamic fundamentalists helped mobilize and empower the forces who would turn on the U.S. and institute a reign of global terrorism in the current situation.
U.S. intervention in the Afghan conflict, which in retrospect appears as the last great clash of the Cold War, helped create the context for the current crisis. As a response to U.S. intervention, the Soviet Union sent in increased aid and personnel to prop up the moderate modernizing Taraki regime that was opposed by Islamic fundamentalists in the country. When Taraki was killed by Afghan army officers in September 1979, the Soviets invaded in force in December 1979 and set up a government to avoid a fundamentalist Islam and U.S.-backed takeover.
In the 1980s, the U.S. began more aggressively supporting Islamic fundamentalist Jihad groups and the Afghanistan project was a major covert foreign policy project of the Reagan-Bush administrations (see Cooley 2000). During this period, the CIA trained, armed, and financed precisely those Islamic fundamentalist groups who later became part of the Al Qaeda terror network and those Islamic fundamentalist groups who are now the nemesis of the West, the new “evil empire.” In the battle to defeat Soviet Communism in the Cold War, both the Saudis and U.S. poured billions into Afghanistan to train “freedom fighters” who would overthrow the allegedly communist regime. This was a major project with billions of overt and cover aid that went into training and arming radical Islamic groups who would emerge with a desire to fight other great wars for Islam. These groups included Osama bin Laden and those who would later form his Al Qaeda network.
Indeed, the blockback from the Reagan-Bush-CIA Afghanistan intervention was astonishing. John K. Cooley in his important study Unholy Wars. Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism) (2000) documents the momentous consequences of the U.S. and its allies supported the Islamists who fought to overthrow the Soviet-backed government in Afghanistan. Egypt’s Anwar Sadat was an early ally of the support for the Islamists against the Soviets and was repaid with assassination by fanatic Islamics in 1981. Pakistan’s president, Zia al-Haq, whose secret services played a major role in arming and organizing the Islamic fighters in Afghanistan was killed in a mysterious plane crash in 1988 and more radical Islamic forces took over in Pakistan. The Pakistani secret services organized the group that became the Taliban in the mid-1990s and the Taliban quickly took over control of most of the country, forming an alliance with Bin Laden and his Al Qaeda networks who used Afghanistan to form networks who engaged in terrorism throughout the world, eventually turning on the U.S., the country that had helped fund, train, and arm them!
Not only did the U.S. secret war in Afghanistan to organize Islamic militia against the Soviets create the Islamic terror network that is now the scourge of the West, but the same Islamic radical forces, with the complicity of the CIA and other foreign intelligence services, produced the most stupendous explosion of drugs in history. As Cooley summarizes: “Never has so much South Asian marijuana, opium, and semi-processed opium products and heroin, reached the drug pushes, the adult addicts, the children, and the general populations of the West, as in the late 1990s. Much of this was another direct consequence of the CIA'’ holy war of 1979-89” (2000: 5). It is, of course, impossible to document how much tonnage of drug products were exported, but while Afghanistan produced mostly for local consumption before 1979, according to UN figures production in 1995-1996 had risen to 2,6000 tons of raw opium, increasing to 2,800 tons in 1997 (2000: 150). The results were skyrocketing drug addiction in neighboring countries and massive exporting of drugs to the West.
In 1989, Soviet troops left Afghanistan in defeat and a civil war continued for the next several years. The first Bush administration, in one of its most cynical and fateful decisions, decided to completely pull out of Afghanistan, rather than working to build democracy and a viable government in that country. In retrospect, this was both inhumane and catastrophic. Over two million people had died in the ten years of the Afghan war, the U.S. had invested billions of dollars in overthrowing the Russian-sponsored regime and in arming, training, and financing the Islamic fundamentalists. But rather than help the Afghan people produce a viable government, the first Bush administration turned away, and the most radical extremist Islamic fundamentalist group that the U.S. and Pakistanis had help train, now called the Taliban, took over the country after some years more of civil war, setting up the present conflict (see Rashid 2000).
While later certain U.S. interests would be attracted to the oil and gas possibilities in Afghanistan and would cosy up to and support the Taliban, in the early 1990s, the Bush administration had other fish to fry, in particular Iraq - another Bush I intervention that had momentous consequences. For after arousing the Arab world in hatred against the U.S. military intervention in Iraq, at the end of the Gulf war in 1991, the Bush administration persuaded the Saudi government to allow the U.S. to continue to position their forces in the holy land of Islam. This auspicious event has yet to be fully perceived in its blowback effects. For it was the permanent positioning of U.S. troops in what was perceived as the Islamic Holy Land, Saudi Arabia, that especially angered bin Laden and more radical Islamic groups. When Saudi Arabia continued to allow the presence of U.S. troops after the Gulf war, bin Laden broke with his country and was declared persona non grata by the Saudis for his provocative statements and behavior. It was also reported at this time that Saudis put out a contract on bid Laden’s life, supposedly with the assent of the first Bush Administration (Weaver 1996) and later with the assent of the Clinton administration, although assassination attempts obviously failed, if they were seriously attempted at all.
As civil war raged in Afghanistan in the mid-1990s, Pakistani military and intelligence groups, with the support of the CIA, funded and organized one particularly fanatical Islamic group, the Taliban (see Rashid 2001). This group of radical Islamics eventually took over control of much of the country in the mid-1990s, promising to stabilize the region and gaining recognition by the Saudis and Pakistan governments, but not the UN and much of the rest of the world, which recognized the National Alliance groups fighting the Taliban as the legitimate representative of Afghanistan. When bin Laden and his associates were expelled from Sudan, they went to Afghanistan where they solidified their network, developed training camps, and solicited recruits and financing.
The Clinton administration continued the Bush administration’s problematic policies in Afghanistan, at first engaging the Taliban government in dialogue and failing to deal with the bin Laden problem. For by the mid to late 1990s, Bin Laden established an organization of former Afghanistan holy war veterans, called al Qaeda, “the host.” In February 1998, bin Laden issued a statement, endorsed by several extreme Islamic groups, declaring it the duty of all Muslims to kill U.S. citizens -- civilian or military -- and their allies everywhere. The bombing of U.S. embassies in Africa later in 1998 was ascribed to the bin Laden/al Qaeda network, and the Clinton administration responded by shooting 70 Cruise missiles at a factory supposedly owned by bin Laden in Sudan that produced chemical weapons and at camps in Afghanistan that allegedly were populated by bid Laden and his group. The factory in Sudan turned out to be a pharmaceutical company and the camps in Afghanistan were largely deserted, producing another embarrassment for U.S. policy in the Middle East; Clinton later claimed that his administration also was plotting to assassinate bid Laden, but that a change of Pakistani government disrupted the plot, marking two U.S. administration plots to assassinate the Islamic leader, who was obviously hardened against the U.S. by such policies.[6]
Curiously, there is a close relation between the Bush and bin Laden family. Salem bin Laden, Osama’s eldest brother, reportedly invested in George W. Bush’s first business venture, Arbusto Energy, thanks to W’s friend and business partner James Bath, who was also involved in the infamous BCCI bank scandals and was allegedly a CIA agent recruited by W’s father (see Brewton 1992: 221ff; Beatty and Gwynne 1993; and Hatfield 2000: 55-56).[7]
Moreover, the bin Laden family had been involved in other ventures with the Bush family up to the present. Internet commentator Sally Slate cited an interesting passage from a PBS Frontline website on the bin Laden and Bush connection:
Like his father in 1968, Salem [bin Laden] died in a 1988 air crash . . . in Texas. He was flying a BAC 111 which had been bought in July 1977 by Prince Mohammed Ben Fahd. The plane's flight plans had long been at the center of a number of investigations. According to one of the plane's American pilots, it had been used in October 1980 during secret Paris meetings between U.S. and Iranian emissaries. Nothing was ever proven, but Salem bin Laden's accidental death revived some speculation that he might have been "eliminated" as an embarrassing witness. In fact, an inquiry was held to determine the exact circumstances of the accident. The conclusions were never divulged."[8]
It had been long known, but rarely discussed in the mainstream U.S. media, that the Bush and bin Laden families had been involved in various economic and political activities and this passage suggests that one of these projects might have been the October Surprise. It has long been alleged and well-documented that representatives from the Reagan-Bush election team in 1980 reportedly negotiated with Iranians to hold Americans hostage until after the 1980 election, depriving then President Carter of an “October Surprise” from release of the long-held U.S. hostages in Iran that might give Carter the election. Curiously, an editor’s note was added to the Frontline report cited above stating: “The above paragraph is inaccurate. Salem bin Laden was piloting a light aircraft, not a BaC 111, when he crashed. As for 'secret Paris meetings between U.S. and Iranian emissaries' in October 1980, such meetings have never been confirmed."
This story suggests the longtime, secretive, and highly complex relations between the Bush and the bin Laden family. It is highly suspicious that bin Laden’s father died in an airplane crash in Texas, as did Osama’s elder brother Salem who took over the head of the family’s empire of business and political interests after his father’s death, and also in Texas!! As I note below, the Bush and bin Laden families were involved in many enterprises. Unraveling these threads will no doubt be one of the most important and revealing tasks for future historians.
Whatever the bizarre and shady past relations between the Bush and bin Laden family, it is striking that relations between the families continue to the present. It has been widely reported that the bin Laden family has been an investor in the Carlyle investment group, in which James Baker and George H.W. Bush are major partners, and Bush senior and the bin Laden’s were allegedly involved in the earlier major global scandal of its era, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), that funneled the money of spies, criminals, shady businesses, and the CIA during the Reagan-Bush era (see Brewton 1992 and Cooley 2000).
The official spin-line of Bush and bin Laden family spokespeople is that the family has long expelled and condemned their wayward son Osama and cannot be held responsible for al Qaeda crimes. But as Sally Slate notes: “Last Thursday on ABC's Primetime, Carmen bin Laden, the estranged wife of Osama's brother Yeslam, told Diane Sawyer, in regard to Osama's standing in Saudi Arabia, "What I have heard is he has the backing of some of the royal family. They think the same way. Not all of them, but some of them. You have to understand, I think in Saudi Arabia Osama bin Laden has a little following. And in my opinion, this is what makes him dangerous. . . . Because he has, I think, he has the backing of a lot of people there."[9]
Other commentators have claimed that the bin Laden/al Qaeda network has been supported by wealthy Saudis, including members of bin Laden’s family and that up until the September 11 terror attacks, there were close connections between the Bush administration, the Saudis, and the Taliban. A November 2001 PBS Frontline on “The Saudi Time Bomb” made clear the support of Bin Laden and the Al Qaeda network by the Saudi regime and also revealed that the Saudis shared a similar Wahabbi interpretation of Islam that is rooted in an 18th century attempt to return to the early version of Islam, is highly puritanical and repressive of women, and is exceptionally hostile to the West, a particular version of Islam that has influenced Al Qaeda and the Taliban. The Saudis helped fund the Taliban and set up throughout the world fundamentalist Wahabbi Islamic schools that became recruiting grounds for Bin Laden and the Al Qaeda network. Other Saudis directly contributed to Al Qaeda through “charitable” foundations or other means.
While this is rarely mentioned in the mainstream media, the Bush Administration became one of the largest financial supporters of the Taliban, providing over $100 million this year in what they deemed “humanitarian aid,” as well as a supplemental grant of $43 million in May of 2001 for the Taliban’s promise to declare opium production “unIslamic” and thus to cut back on a potent source of the world’s drug trade. Given the fact that the Taliban has allegedly been a major exporter of opium, which is Afghanistan’s major cash crop, it raised eyebrows in knowledgeable circles as to why the Bush Administration would have trusted the Taliban to cut back on opium production. Moreover, it has been suggested that the Bush Administration was acting in the interests of the Unocal oil consortium to build an oil-pipe line across Afghanistan, a project that had purportedly led the oil company to encourage the U.S. to support the Taliban in the first place since they were deemed the group most likely to stabilize Afghanistan and allow the pipeline to be built.[10]
An explosive book published in France in mid-November Bin Laden, la verite interdite (2001), by Jean Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie, claimed that under the influence of oil companies, the Bush administration initially blocked U.S. secret service investigations on terrorism, while it bargained with the Taliban over oil rights and pipeline deals and handing over bin Laden. This allegedly led to the resignation of an FBI deputy director, John O’Neil, who was one of the sources of the story. Indeed, the Bush administration had been a major supporter of the Taliban until the September 11 events. The British Independent reported on October 30: "Secret satellite phone calls between the State Department and Mullah Mohammed Omar and the presentation of an Afghan carpet to President George Bush were just part of the diplomatic contacts between Washington and the Taliban that continued until just days before the attacks of 11 September." Thus, just as Bush senior turned on Saddam Hussein whom he supported in the 1990s, so too did Bush junior turn on the Taliban whom he had been lavishly supporting, supposedly with the hopes that his friends could do oil deals with them.
The Taliban, of course, were a highly theocratic and repressive fundamentalist regime that some have described as “clerical fascism” (Chip Berlet), or “reactionary tribalism” (Robert Antonio). Their treatment of women is notorious, as is their cultural totalitarianism that led to banning of books, media, and destruction of Buddhist statues. The Taliban practice a form of Islam called “Deobandism,” influenced by a 19th century sect that tried to purify Islam of its modern aspects (see Rashid 2000: 88-90), much as the Saudis version of "Wahabbism" followed strict Islamic law, while rejecting much of the modern world. The Taliban went further than the Saudis in trying to purify Islam in a particular anti-modern version, by following a particularly virulent strain of Muslim fundamentalism, rejected by the more mainstream Sunni and Shiite Islamic schools. The Taliban have also been the host of Osama Bin Laden and the Al Qaeda network since they were expelled from Sudan in 1996, at U.S. pressure and insistence. Although Bin Laden and Al Qaeda were deemed enemies of the U.S. since their alleged involvement in a series of terrorist crimes, the Bush Administration continued to provide support to the Taliban group that hosted and protected them.
Not only did the entire Bush family have a long and shady history of dealings with the bin Laden and other dubious Saudi families who funded the al Qaeda network, but, as noted, Bush senior and friends would strongly benefit from the war through their connections with the Carlyle group which heavily invests in the military-defense sector and include as investors the bin Laden Family, election-thief and Bush family friend James Baker, and George H.W. Bush, leading the conservative Judicial Watch group to insist that Bush Senior resign from the group because of conflict of interests.[11] A shocking FBI memo revealed it was ordered by the Bush administration to stop investigating connections between the Al Qaeda network and Bin Laden family and to “lay off the Bin Ladens,” no doubt because of the longtime Bush/Bin Laden family connections.[12]
The Bush-Baker-Cheney-Saudi clan have, of course, long been involved in shady Mid-East oil wheeling and dealing and assorted sordid business deals in the area. Many believe that the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan is largely about controlling the flow of Mid-East oil and enhancing these business interests - as was the last Bush-Cheney operation, the Gulf War.[13] Reports abound of the tremendous oil reserves in Central Asia and the need to build pipelines across Afghanistan that would secure passage. The desirability of secure terrain around the pipeline led, according to some, to Bush administration support of the Taliban who had promised to build the pipeline and create internal security to protect it. But when it was obvious that the Taliban could not be trusted and were involved with the bin Laden network and terrorism, Bush-Cheney turned on their former allies, as did Bush Senior-Cheney-Powell against Saddam Hussein, who had been a U.S. ally throughout the 1980s who some believed came to power in Iraq with Bush/CIA backing (see Kellner 1992).
Of course, it would be a mistake to reduce events like the Gulf War or Afghanistan Terror War to oil and one needs to factor in the military interests, geopolitical goals, and specific agendas of the various Bush administrations. In any case, the events of the September 11 terrorist attacks should be seen in the context of several U.S. administrations and CIA support for the perpetrators of the monstrous assaults on the United States from the late 1970s, through the Reagan-Bush years, to the present. This is not to simply blame U.S. policy in Afghanistan for the terrorist assault of September 11, but it is to provide some of the context in which the events can be interpreted.[14] There are, of course, other flaws of U.S. foreign policy over the past decades which have helped generate enemies of the United States in the Middle East and elsewhere, such as excessive U.S. support for Israel and inadequate support for the Palestinians, U.S. support of authoritarian regimes, and innumerable misdeeds of the U.S. Empire over the past decades that have been documented by Chomsky, Herman, Johnson, and other critics of U.S. foreign policy.
Thus, while there were no doubt a multiplicity of contributing factors, the September 11 events can be read as a blowback of major policies of successive U.S. administrations and the CIA who trained, funded, supported, and armed the groups alleged to have carried out the terrorist attacks on the United States. The obvious lesson is that it is highly dangerous and potentially costly to align one’s country with terrorist groups; that support of groups or individuals who promote terrorism is likely to come back to haunt you; and that it is hazardous to make Machiavellian pacts with obviously brutal and treacherous groups and individuals in violent parts of the world. The conjuncture of Islamic radicalism and failure of subsequent U.S. administrations to take seriously the threats that terrorist groups held helped produce the September 11 terrorist attacks on the U.S. Before engaging the responses of the Bush administration, media, and Pentagon to these attacks, I want to raise the question of how the events of September 11 changed U.S. politics and society.
September 11 and Terror War:
Has Everything Changed?
In the aftermath of September 11, there was a wealth of commentary arguing that “everything has changed,” that the post-September 11 world is a different one, less innocent, more serious, and significantly altered, with momentous modifications in the economy to the polity to culture and everyday life. There were some skeptics such as historian Alan Brinkley who stated in a New York Times interview (Sept. 14, 2002): “I’m skeptical that this is a great rupture in the fabric of history.” Time alone will tell the depth of the magnitude of changes, but there are enough transformations that have occurred already to see September 11 as a transformational event that has created some dramatic alterations in both the U.S. and global society, signaling shifts and novelties in the current world.
In the context of U.S. politics, September 11 was so dramatic, so far-reaching, and so catastrophic that it flipped the political world upside down, put new issues on the agenda, and changed the political, cultural, and economic climate almost completely overnight. To begin, there was a dramatic reversal of the fortunes of George W. Bush and the Bush administration. Before September 11, Bush’s popularity was rapidly declining. After several months of the most breathtaking hardright turn perhaps ever seen in U.S. politics, Bush seemed to lose control of the agenda with the defection of Vermont Republican Senator Jim Jeffords to the Democratic party in May 2001. Jeffords’ defection gave the Democrats a razor-thin control of Congress and the ability to block Bush’s programs and to advance their own (see Kellner 2001, Chapter Eleven). Bush seemed disengaged after this setback, spending more and more time at his Texas ranch. He was widely perceived as incompetent and unqualified and his public support was seriously eroding.
With the terror attacks of September 11, however, bipartisanship disappeared and Bush was the beneficiary of a remarkable outburst of patriotism, strongly fuelled by the media which provided 24/7 coverage of the heroism of the fireman, police, and rescue workers at the World Trade Center. There was also a demonizing coverage of Bin Laden and his Al Qaeda network of terrorists and a demand for strong military retaliation. The anthrax attacks, unsolved as I write in spring 2002, fueled media hysteria and mass panic that terrorism could strike anyone at any time and any place. Bush articulated the escalating patriotism, vilification of the terrorists, and the demand for stern military retaliation, and a frightened nation supported his policies, often without seeing their broader implications and threat to democracy and world peace.
There was a brief and ironical ideological flipflop of Bush administration ideology in which the Bush administration temporarily put aside the unilateralism that had distinguished its first months in office in favor of a multilateral approach. As the Bush administration scrambled to assemble a global coalition against terrorism with partners such as Pakistan, China, and Russia, that the Bush administration had previously ignored or in the case of China even provoked, illusions circulated that the U.S. would pursue a more multilateral global politics. With the collapse of the Taliban and the defacto conclusion of the intense military phase of the Afghanistan Terror War, however, the Bush administration has arguably reverted to its old unilateralism. Thus, the Bush doctrine articulated in his January 2002 State of the Union address projected an “axis of evil” threatened by U.S. military action, called for unprecedented military action and build-up, and evoked an image of an era of war via U.S. military intervention throughout the world for the foreseeable future (see Kellner, forthcoming).
Previous to September 11, The Bush administration had been rabidly pro “free markets” and anti-government, and was forced to recognize the need for stronger government programs. There was widespread consensus that federal funds and programs were necessary to help rebuild New York, provide increased domestic security, and regulate industries like the airplane business, which showed itself to be woefully lacking in security measures. Yet it should be noted that the main government interventions undertaken by the Bush administration were in the areas of “homeland security” and a gigantic military build-up. These included a highly illiberal rightwing law and order fantasy dream of unleashing government agencies to surveil, arrest, and detain those suspected of being terrorists in what many see as the most outrageous assault on civil liberties and the free and open society in U.S. history. There have been no initiatives in the area of investing to rebuild infrastructure of cities, highways, or the public health system. Moreover, Bush’s proposed “economic stimulus” package mainly consisted in tax breaks for the wealthy rather than new government programs to help the poor and those losing their jobs because of a severe economic downturn, brought about partly because of the consequences of the September 11 attacks and partly because of Bush economic policy.
Moreover, government bailouts went mainly to Bush administration allies such as the airlines industry with no funds for job retraining and support for workers laid-off. Hence, although September 11 created a remarkable reversal of fortune for George W. Bush, it has so far not produced any fundamental restructuring of the U.S. economy or polity, outside of rightwing law and order programs and tightened airport and domestic security. The September 11 terror attacks and subsequent anthrax attacks did, however, point to a new vulnerability to terrorism and danger not previously experienced by Americans on U.S. soil.
The new vulnerability caused a reversal of priorities, both national and personal, for many people, and made it clear that the U.S. had to deal with problems of globalization, terrorism, and many issues that were far from the hearts and minds of the average U.S. citizen. For a while, irony was out and seriousness was in, and a new sobriety replaced the usual American concern with triviality and diversion. Americans, like people in most of the world, had to learn to live with finitude, contingency, risk, and other things that were previously philosophical categories and were now realities of everyday life. There was a sudden sense that everything could change within days or weeks, that technologies that were part and parcel of everyday life, such as airplanes or mail delivery, could be weapons of destruction. Furthermore, fears circulated that technological weapons of mass destruction threatened Americans anywhere and anytime, creating new forms of insecurity and anxiety which the media fuelled with hysteric reporting on the anthrax attacks, endless reports on terrorist networks, and dramatized reports of the Afghanistan Terror War.
Crucially, the September 11 events dramatized that globalization is a defining reality of our time and that the much-celebrated flow of people, ideas, technology, media, and goods could have a down side as well as an upside, and expensive costs as well as benefits. For the first time, the American people were obliged to perceive that it had serious enemies throughout the globe and that global problems had to be addressed. No longer could the U.S. enjoy the luxury of isolationism, but was forced to actively define its role within a dangerous and complex global environment.
In the next section, I analyze how certain social discourses were deployed within the media and public policy debates and served to inform or legitimate certain practices. In a study of the dominant discourses, frames, and representations that informed the media and public debate after the September 11 terrorist attacks, I show how the mainstream media in the United States privileged the “clash of civilizations” model, established a binary dualism between Islamic terrorism and civilization, and largely circulated war fever and retaliatory feelings and discourses that called for and supported a form of military intervention. I argue that such one-dimensional militarism could arguably make the current crisis worse, rather than providing solutions to the problem of global terrorism. Thus, while the media in a democracy should critically debate urgent questions facing the nation, in the terror crisis the mainstream corporate media, especially television, promoted war fever and military solutions to the problem of global terrorism.[15]
On the day of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, the networks brought out an array of national security state intellectuals, usually ranging from the right to the far right, to explain the horrific events of September 11. The Fox Network presented former UN Ambassador and Reagan Administration apologist Jeane Kirkpatrick, who rolled out a simplified version of Huntington’s clash of civilizations, arguing that we were at war with Islam and should defend the West. Kirkpatrick was the most discredited intellectual of her generation, legitimating Reagan administration alliances with unsavory fascists and terrorists as necessary to beat Soviet totalitarianism. Her 1980s propaganda line was premised on a distinction between fascism and communist totalitarianism which argued that alliances with authoritarian or rightwing terrorist organizations or states were defensible since these regimes were open to reform efforts or historically undermined themselves and disappeared. Soviet totalitarianism, by contrast, should be resolutely opposed since a communist regime had never collapsed or been overthrown and communism was an intractable and dangerous foe, which must be fought to the death with any means necessary. Of course, the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s, along with its Empire, and although Kirkpatrick was totally discredited she was awarded a Professorship at Georgetown and allowed to continue to circulate her crackpot views.
On the afternoon of September 11, Ariel Sharon, leader of Israel, himself implicated in war crimes in Sabra and Shatila in Lebanon in 1982, came on television to convey his regret, condolescences, and assurance of Israel’s support in the war on terror. Sharon called for a coalition against terrorist networks, which would contrast the free world with terrorism, representing the Good vs. Evil, “humanity” vs. “the blood-thirsty,” “the free world” against “the forces of darkness,” who are trying to destroy “freedom” and our “way of life.”
Curiously, the Bush Administration would take up the same tropes with Bush attacking the “evil” of the terrorists, using the word five times in his first statement on the September 11 terror assaults, and repeatedly portraying the conflict as a war between good and evil in which the U.S. was going to “eradicate evil from the world,” “to smoke out and pursueŠ evil doers, those barbaric people.” The semantically insensitive and dyslexic Bush administration also used cowboy metaphors, calling for bin Laden “dead or alive,” and described the campaign as a “crusade,” until he was advised that this term carried offensive historical baggage of earlier wars of Christians and Moslems. And the Pentagon at first named the war against terror “Operation Infinite Justice,” until they were advised that only God could dispense “infinite justice,” and that Americans and others might be troubled about a war expanding to infinity.
Disturbingly, in mentioning the goals of the war, Bush never mentioned “democracy,” and the new name for the campaign became “Operation Enduring Freedom.” The Bush Administration mantra became that the war against terrorism is being fought for “freedom.” But we know from the history of political theory and history itself that freedom must be paired with equality, or things like justice, rights, or democracy, to provide adequate political theory and legitimation for political action. As we shall see, it is precisely the contempt for democracy and self-autonomy that has characterized U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East for the past decades, which is a prime reason why groups and individuals in the area passionately hate the United States.
What was not noted was that the dominant rightwing and Bush Administration discourses, like those of bin Laden and radical Islamists, are fundamentally Manichean, positing a binary opposition between Good and Evil, Us and Them, civilization and barbarism. It is assumed by both sides that “we” are the good, and the “Other” is wicked, an assertion that Bush made almost daily in his assurance that the “evil-doers” of the “evil deeds” will be punished, and that the “Evil One,” will be brought to justice, implicitly equating bin Laden with Satan himself.
Such hyperbolical rhetoric is a salient example of Bushspeak that communicates through codes to specific audiences, in this case domestic Christian rightwing groups that are Bush’s preferred subjects of his discourse. But demonizing terms for bin Laden both elevate his status in the Arab world as a superhero who stands up to the West, and angers those who feel such discourse is insulting. Moreover, the trouble with the discourse of “evil” is that it is totalizing and absolutistic, allowing no ambiguities or contradictions. It assumes a binary logic where “we” are the forces of goodness and “they” are the forces of darkness. The discourse of evil is also cosmological and apocalyptic, evoking a cataclysmic war with cosmic stakes. On this perspective, Evil cannot be just attacked and eliminated one piece at a time, through incremental steps, but it must be totally defeated, eradicated from the earth if Good is to reign. This discourse of evil raises the stakes and violence of conflict and nurtures more apocalyptic and catastrophic politics, fuelling future cycles of hatred, violence, and wars.
Deploying the discourse of evil also makes Bin Laden and Al Qaeda much more irrational than they in fact are and makes it harder to understand and to defeat them. In fact, the Bin Laden group has a very specific agenda and priorities: to promote Islamic Jihad against the West and in particular to overthrow the current rulers of Saudi Arabia and to create an Islamic Republic there, as has been produced, in different variants in Iran and in the Afghanistan Taliban regime. The U.S. is seen as the modernizing and secular force in the West, the major support of Israel and Saudi Arabia and thus logically the major enemy of a Jihadist. The Bin Laden network is not just a group of fanatic terrorists but a well-financed and organized network including many mosques, madrassas and religious schools, and organizations throughout the world. It has its financial institutions, its business fronts, its charity and religious institutions, and tacit and operative supporters. To defeat the Bin Laden network thus requires not just the destruction of the Taliban and Al Qaeda group in Afghanistan but an entire global network that will require a global and multilateral coalition and activity across the legal, judicial, political, military, ideological, and pedagogical fronts.
Personalizing the problem as Bin Laden and demonizing him as evil thus deflects attention from the global network of Jihadism and the many dimensions of struggle. It exaggerates the importance of military action as a violent and retaliatory tool of the destruction of evil and decenters the importance of dialogue, understanding, coalition-building, and using the instruments of global finance, law, and politics to isolate and overcome the forces of global terrorism.
It is especially offensive and hypocritical that George W. Bush deploys “evil” as his favorite word for terrorism as it implies that he himself is “good,” whereas scrutiny of his biography indicates that Junior is really a very, very bad guy. After years of frat boy ribaldry at Yale, Bush got his father to pull strings so he would not have to go to Vietnam and he got into the Texas National Guard Air Reserves. During his lost years in the 1970s, he reportedly went AWOL for a year from National Guard duty, was a heavy alcohol and drug abuser, and a nair-do-well failure who finally decided to put together an oil company when he was already well into his 30s. Investors reportedly included the Bin Laden family and other unsavory types and his initial company Arbusto went bust and was taken over by Harken Energy, with family friends again jumping in to bail Junior out. Harken received a lucrative Barain oil contract in part as a result of Bush family connections, and the Harken stock went up. But as a member of the Board of Directors, Junior knew that declining profits figures for the previous quarter, about to be released, would depress the value of the stock, so George W. unloaded his stock, in what some see an in illegal insider trading dump. Moreover, young Bush failed to register his questionable sale with the SEC, although later a paper was produced indicating that he had eventually registered the sale, some eight months after he dumped his stock (it helped that his father was President when Junior should have been investigated for his questionable business dealings).
With the money made from his Harken disinvesture, Junior invested in the Texas Rangers baseball team and was made General Manager when some other Texas good old boys put up the money. Using a public bond issue that he pushed upon voters to finance construction of a new Rangers stadium, the stock value of the baseball team went up. Once again, Bush sold out for a hefty profit and then ran as Governor of Texas, despite no political experience and a shaky business history. His two terms in office wrecked the state economy as it went from surplus to deficit thanks to a tax bill that gave favors to the wealthiest, sweetheart deals and deregulation bonanzas to his biggest campaign contributors, that helped make Texas the site of the most toxic environmental pollution and outrageous corporate skullduggery in the country. Bush provided questionable favors to a nursing home corporations that faced state investigation and strong support for the wheelin’ and dealin’ Enron Company, one of the biggest financial contributors to Bush’s campaigns and, as well shall see, a corporation that underwent the biggest collapse of any U.S. company in history, under highly questionable circumstances.
Promising to do for the U.S. and global economy and polity what he did for Texas, Bush had the gall to run for President, stealing the 2000 election with the help of the Bush family gang in Florida and family consigliere James Baker, as well as the treason of a gang of Supreme Court thugs, whom fabled prosecutor Vince Bugliosi (2000) dubbed the “felonious five” (Kellner 2001). During his first 100 days in office, Bush gave his biggest corporate contributors unparalleled tax and regulatory breaks, which threatens to push through the most scandalous transfer of wealth from poor to rich since the Reagan-Bush regimes and to seriously weaken the U.S. and global economy. Bush also tried to push through a hardright social agenda. After the Democrats seized control of the domestic agenda in late May 2001, with the defection of Republican Senator Jim Jeffords, Bush’s hardright and utterly corrupt agenda seemed side-tracked. But the September 11 attacks strengthened his hand and enabled his cronies to carry through even more radical hardright assaults on civil liberties and the free and open society, as well as to attempt more federal theft through the mechanism of an economic “stimulus” package. Such stimulus, as proposed by the Bush administration, would constitute even greater corporate giveaways and tax breaks to the rich and his biggest contributors.[16]
George W. Bush was thus hardly someone who could use the discourse of evil with impunity and all the denial in the world and bombing of Afghanistan cannot purge him of a life-time of sleaze, corruption, and hypocrisy. Every time Bush or a member of the Bush administration uses the term “evil” one should put out their crap detector and challenge the speaker to defend what is good about George W. Bush’s entire life and political record and those of the domestic and foreign policies of the Bush administration.
Not only has Bush made the discourse of “good” and “evil” impossible to use by honorable people, but the Bushspeak dualisms between fear and freedom, barbarism and civilization, and the like can hardly be sustained in empirical and theoretical analysis of the contemporary moment. In fact, there is much fear and poverty in “our” world and wealth, and freedom and security in the Arab and Islamic worlds - at least for privileged elites. No doubt, freedom, fear, and wealth are distributed in both worlds so to polarize these categories and to make them the legitimating principles of war is highly irresponsible. And associating oneself with “good,” while making one’s enemy “evil,” is another exercise in binary reductionism and projection of all traits of aggression and wickedness onto the “other” while constituting oneself as good and pure.
It is, of course, theocratic Islamic fundamentalists who themselves engage in similar simplistic binary discourse which they use to legitimate acts of terrorism. For certain Manichean Islamic fundamentalists, the U.S. is evil, the source of all the world’s problems and deserves to be destroyed. Such one-dimensional thought does not distinguish between U.S. policies, people, or institutions, while advocating a Jihad, or holy war against the American evil. The terrorist crimes of September 11 appeared to be part of this Jihad and the monstrousness of the actions of killing innocent civilians shows the horrific consequences of totally dehumanizing an “enemy” deemed so “evil” that even innocent members of the group in question deserve to be exterminated.
Many
commentators on U.S. television offered similarly one-sided and Manichean
accounts of the cause of the September 11 events, blaming their favorite opponents
in the current U.S. political spectrum as the source of the terror assaults.
For fundamentalist Christian ideologue Jerry Falwell, and with the verbal
agreement of Christian Broadcast Network President Pat Robertson, the
culpability for this "horror beyond words" fell on liberals,
feminists, gays and the ACLU. Jerry Falwell said and Pat Robertson agreed: "The abortionists have got to bear
some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40
million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the
pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians
who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People
for the American Way--all of them who have tried to secularize America--I point
the finger in their face and say, 'You helped this happen.'" In fact, this
argument is similar to a rightwing Islamic claim that the U.S. is fundamentally
corrupt and evil and thus deserves God’s wrath, an argument made against Falwell
by his critics that forced the fundamentalist fanatic to apologize.
For rightwingers, like Gary Aldrich the “President and Founder" of the Patrick Henry Center, it was the liberals who were at fault: "Excuse me if I absent myself from the national political group-hug that's going on. You see, I believe the Liberals are largely responsible for much of what happened Tuesday, and may God forgive them. These people exist in a world that lies beyond the normal standards of decency and civility.” Other rightists, like Rush Limbaugh, argued incessantly that it was all Bill Clinton’s fault, and Election-thief manager James Baker (see Kellner 2001) blamed the catastrophe on the 1976 Church report that put limits on the CIA.[17]
On the issue of “what to do,” rightwing columnist Ann Coulter declaimed: "We know who the homicidal maniacs are. They are the ones cheering and dancing right now. We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity."[18] While Bush was declaring a “crusade” against terrorism and the Pentagon was organizing “Operation Infinite Justice,” Bush Administration Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said the administration's retaliation would be "sustained and broad and effective" and that the United States "will use all our resources. It's not just simply a matter of capturing people and holding them accountable, but removing the sanctuaries, removing the support systems, ending states who sponsor terrorism."
Such all-out war hysteria was the order of the day, and throughout September 11 and its aftermath ideological warhorses like William Bennett came out and urged that the U.S. declare war on Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, and whoever else harbored terrorists. On the Canadian Broadcasting Network, former Reagan administration, Deputy Secretary of Defense and military commentator Frank Gaffney suggested that the U.S. needed to go after the sponsors of these states as well, such as China and Russia, to the astonishment and derision of the Canadian audience. And rightwing talk radio and the Internet buzzed with talk of dropping nuclear bombs on Afghanistan, exterminating all Moslems, and whatever other fantasy popped into their unhinged heads.
My point is that broadcast television allowed dangerous and arguably deranged zealots to vent and circulate the most aggressive, fanatic, and downright lunatic views, creating a consensus around the need for immediate military action and all-out war. The television networks themselves featured logos such as “War on America,” “America’s New War,” and other inflammatory slogans that assumed that the U.S. was at war and that only a military response was appropriate. I saw few cooler heads on any of the major television networks that repeatedly beat the war drums day after day, without even the relief of commercials for three days straight, driving the country into hysteria and terrifying rational and sane citizens throughout the world.
Radio was even more frightening. Not surprisingly, talk radio oozed hatred and hysteria, calling for violence against Arabs and Muslims, demanding nuclear retaliation, and global war. As the days went by, even mainstream radio news became hyperdramatic, replete with music, patriotic gore, and wall-to-wall terror hysteria and war propaganda. National Public Radio, Pacifica, and some discussion programs attempted rational discussion and debate, but on the whole radio was all propaganda, all the time.
There is no question concerning the depth of emotion and horror with which the nation experienced the first serious assault on U.S. territory by its enemies. The constant invocation of analogies to “Pearl Harbor” inevitably elicited a need to strike back and prepare for war. The attack on the World Trade Center and New York City evoked images of assault on the very body of the country, while the attack on the Pentagon represented an assault on the country’s defense system, showing the vulnerability, previously unperceived, of the U.S. to external attack and terror.
For some years, an increasing amount of “expert consultants” were hired by the television corporations to explain complex events to the public. The military consultants hired by the networks had close connections to the Pentagon and usually would express the Pentagon point of view and spin of the day, making them more propaganda conduits for the military than independent analysts. Commentators and Congressman, like John McCain (R-Arz.), Henry Kissinger, James Baker, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and other long-time advocates of the military-industrial complex, described the attacks as an “act of war” immediately on September 11 and the days following. For hawkish pundits, the terror attacks required an immediate military response and dramatic expansion of the U.S. military. Many of these hawks were former government officials, like Kissinger and Baker, who were currently tied into the defense industries, guaranteeing that their punditry would be paid for by large profits of the defense industries that they were part of. Indeed, the Bush family, James Baker and other advocates of large-scale military retribution were connected with the Carlyle Fund, the largest investor in military industries in the world. Consequently, these advocates of war would profit immensely from sustained military activity, an embarrassment rarely mentioned on television or the mainstream press, but that was widely discussed in alternative media and the Internet.[19]
The network anchors as well framed the event as a military attack, with Peter Jennings of ABC stating “the response is going to have to be massive if it is to be effective.” NBC, owned by General Electric the largest U.S. military corporation, as usual promoted military action and its talk shows were populated by pundits who invariably urged immediate military retribution. To help generate and sustain widespread public desire for military intervention, the networks played show after show detailing the harm done to victims of the bombing, kept their cameras aimed at “Ground Zero” to document the damage and destruction and drama of discovery of dead bodies, and constructed report after report on the evil of bin Laden and the Al Qaeda terrorists who had committed the atrocities.
To continue the sense of drama and urgency, and to ensure that viewers kept tuned into the story and their channels, the television cable news networks all added “Crawlers” to the bottom of their screens, endlessly repeating bulletins of the latest news highlighting the terrorist attack and its consequences. It was remarkable, in fact, how quickly the media corporations produced frames for the event, constructed it as it was going on, and provided innovative and striking visuals and graphics to capture viewer attention. Already on September 11, CNN constructed a four-tier graphic presentation with a capitalized and blazing BREAKING NEWS title on the top of their screen, followed by a graphic describing the ATTACK ON AMERICA, or whatever slogan was being used to construct the event. Next, a title described what was being currently portrayed in the visuals flashed across the screen, with the crawlers scrolling the headlines on the bottom. In a remarkable presentation of the talk of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon on September 11, for instance, the visuals were split between Sharon’s picture in Tel Aviv, images of the World Trade Center bomb site, and the graphics summarizing Sharon’s talk and the headlines crawling along the bottom of the screen. While the Bush administration obviously had no idea what was happening to the U.S. as Bush’s plane presidential plane frantically flew around the country and Vice-President Dick Cheney was carried off to the mountains to hide, the TV networks were fully in control with frames, discourses, and explanations of the momentous events. It was a tremendous formal accomplishment for the high-tech flash visual production capabilities of the networks, although one could question the intelligence of the interpretations, or the military retribution being fervently espoused without contradiction.
The U.S. corporate media continued to fan the war fever and there was an orgy of patriotism such as the country had not seen since World War II. Media frames shifted from “America Under Attack” to “America Strikes Back” and “America’s New War” - even before any military action was undertaken, as if the media frames were to conjure the military response that eventually followed. As indicated, during the initial day of attack on September 11 and for the next few weeks, the networks continued to beat the war drums and the mouthpieces of the military-industrial complex continued to shout for military action with little serious reflection on its consequences visible on the television networks, although there was much intelligent discussion on the Internet, showing the dangers of the take-over of broadcasting by corporations who would profit by war and upheaval.
The flag became a dominant icon for television news logos and graphics, as well as a potent advertising device for a wealth of products. TV entertainment shows peppered its programs with flags, as regular series like The West Wing and Law and Order used computer-generated flags to help capture viewer attention and spread the new patriotism. Flags in ads for automobiles, soft drinks, and other products multiplied endlessly. As patriotism swept across the country, advertisers picked up on the vibe with General Motors broadcastings ads to "Keep America Rolling," while Ford motors insisted that "Ford drives America." The flag and the traditional red, white and blue provided a bonanza for web designers, as major corporations immediately redesigned their websites to reflect the new patriotism with major U.S. corporations ranging from PepsiCo to Proctor & Gamble, Microsoft, Dell, the Gap, and Ask Jeeves, re-presenting their websites in flashy red, white, and blue.
A return to normal was signaled by the return of TV entertainment, advertising, and the evening late-night entertainment shows, after a few days of all-news-all-the-time. But it was not an especially proud moment for American television. CBS anchor Dan Rather, in one of the most embarrassing media performances of his life, blubbered on the David Letterman show that “George W. Bush is my President” and that he would do whatever told, a pathetic collapse of a once-critical and respected journalist. Fox TV and the NBC networks continued to be wall-to-wall propaganda for whatever line the Bush administration was putting out, and CNN became almost totally propagandistic, in a stunning collapse of a respectable news organization into a vehicle of conservative ideology.
This result was an appalling performances by U.S. broadcasting networks during a time that should have been marked by a profound national debate over the proper response to the terrorist threat, as was being conducted daily on the Internet and in some of the foreign press and media. The unrelenting war hysteria on the television networks and utter failure to produce anything near a coherent analysis of what happened on September 11 and reasonable response to the terrorist attacks put on display the frightening consequences of allowing corporate media institutions to hire ideologically compliant news teams who have no competency to deal with complex political events and who allow the most irresponsible views to circulate. I saw few, if any, intelligent presentations of the complexity of U.S. history in the Middle East on television, or accounts of the origins of Bin Laden and his network that discussed the complicity of the U.S. in training, funding, arming, and supporting the groups that became Islamic fundamentalist terrorists. Nor did I see any accounts that went into the U.S. relations between the Taliban, the multifaceted U.S. role in Afghanistan, or the complications of Middle Eastern politics that would make continuous retaliatory military action extremely dangerous and potentially catastrophic. Such alternative information circulated through the media, including major newspapers, but rarely found its way into American television which emerges at this point in our current crisis as a thoroughly irresponsible source of information and understanding.
Many U.S. citizens were genuinely perplexed at the amount of hatred in the Arab world for America and the print media predictably featured articles, symposia, and discussions of “Why do they hate us?” The Bush administration answer was that it was precisely because of what was best about the U.S. that produced fear and hatred, our freedoms, wealth, and open society. Critics of U.S. foreign policy, who rarely were allowed on television, argued that it was what was worst about the U.S. that incurred hatred, its aggressive foreign policy, support of corrupt dictators in the Arab world, as well as Israel, and its general superpower status. In fact, and one never heard such complex analyses in the broadcasting world, it was a contradictory mixture of both what is best and worst about the U.S. that generated hatred of the U.S. in the Arab world. Bin Laden and his operatives regularly repeated the litany of Arab grievances of U.S. policy. But it is also true that radical Islamists seriously hated U.S. culture and modernity, in particular, those features that attracted fascination throughout the world, such as U.S. consumer culture, fashion and style, media and communications, technology, and open life-styles and sexuality. Likewise, the tremendous differences between haves and have nots, between American wealth and global poverty, generated resentment. Probably superpowers will always be partially loved and partially resented, but in an era of globalization, U.S. supremacy in the world economy, polity, culture, media and technology generated a potent mixture of attraction and repulsion, love and hatred, expressing itself in a variety of ways.
U.S. broadcasting thus provided exceptionally impoverished understanding of the historical context of terrorism and war, was frighteningly biased toward war fever, generated untold hysteria, and thus provided generally anti-Enlightenment functions. Yet one could get a wealth of information, cogent analyses, historical contextualizations, and intelligent diversity of opinion and debate on the Internet. Surveys indicated that during this period of intense crisis and terror, audiences in the U.S. tended to turn to television for clarification and this was arguably a disastrous mistake. Rarely has television functioned so poorly in an era of crisis, generating more heat than light, more sound, fury and spectacle than understanding, and more blatantly grotesque partisanship for the Bush administration than genuinely democratic debate over what options the country and the world faced in the confrontation with terrorism.
This situation calls attention once again to the major contradiction of the present age in regard to information and knowledge. On one hand, the U.S. has available the most striking array of information, opinions, debate, and sources of knowledge of any society in history with its profusion of print journalism, books, articles, and Internet sources in contrast to the poverty of information on television. This is truly a scandal and a contradiction in the construction of contemporary consciousness and political culture. Thus, while television functioned largely as propaganda, spectacle, and the producer of mass hysteria, close to brain-washing, fortunately, there is a wealth of informed analysis and interpretation available in print media and on the Internet, as well as a respectable archive of books and articles on the complexity of U.S. foreign policy and Middle East history. I draw on this literature in the following sections as I dissect the U.S. mainstream media, Bush administration, and Pentagon versions of Afghanistan Terror War and provide alternative accounts based on critical journalism from throughout the world and scholarly reports beginning to emerge.
Terrorism and Terror War: Operation Enduring Freedom and the Dangers of Infinite Blowback
After several weeks following the September 11 terror attacks in which the global community appeared to be building an effective strategy to fight terrorism by arresting suspected members of the al Qaeda network, tracking and blocking their financial support, and developing internal and global mechanisms and policies to fight terrorism, suddenly the campaign against terrorism turned to war. On Sunday, October 7, just short of one month after the September 11 attacks, the Bush administration unleashed a full-scale military assault on Afghanistan, purportedly to annihilate the bin Laden network and to destroy the Taliban regime in Afghanistan that had hosted them. The unilateralism of the U.S. response was striking. Indeed, leading American newspapers provided a rationale for U.S. rejection of a UN-led or NATO-led coalition against international terrorism:
In the leadup to a possible military strike, senior administration and allied officials said Mr. Rumsfeld's approach this week made clear that the United States intends to make it as much as possible an all-American campaign.
One reason, they said, is that the United States is determined to avoid the limitations on its targets that were imposed by NATO allies during the 1999 war in Kosovo, or the hesitance to topple a leader that members of the gulf war coalition felt in 1991.
"Coalition is a bad word, because it makes people think of alliances," said Robert Oakley, former head of the State Department's counter-terrorism office and former ambassador to Pakistan.
A senior
administration official put it more bluntly: "The fewer people you have to
rely on, the fewer permissions you have to get” (New York Times, October 7,
2001).
Within the hour, in a startling interruption of the mainstream media’s pro-U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan, the networks released a video-feed of a speech from bin Laden and his chief partners-in-crime, probably fed to the Quatar-based al Jazeera network in advance. Playing to an Arab audience, Ayman al-Zawahri, the Egyptian doctor who many believed to be a major political/strategic force in the al Queda terrorist network, assailed the U.S. support of Israel, failure to help produce a Palestinian state, the U.S.-led assault against Iraq in the Gulf war, and the subsequent stationing of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, the Arab Holy Land, among other Arab grievances.
Then bin Laden himself came on in his now familiar turban and camouflage jacket, an assault rifle by his side, and Afghanistan landscape with a cave behind him. In ornate Arabic, translated erratically by the network translators who were trying to render his speech into English, bin Laden praised the September 11 strike on America that “destroyed its buildings” and created “fear from North to South,” praising God for this attack. Calling for a Jihad to “destroy America,” bin Laden attacked the “debauched,” “oppressive” Americans who have “followed injustice,” and exhorted every Muslim to join the Jihad. The world was now divided, bin Laden insisted, into two sides, “the side of believers and the side of infidels,” and everyone who stands with America is a “coward” and an “infidel.”
Remarkably, bin Laden’s Manichean dualism mirrored the discourse of Sharon, Bush, and those in the West who proclaimed the war against terrorism as a Holy War between Good and Evil, Civilization and Barbarism. Both dichotomized their Other as dominated by fear, Bush claiming that his Holy War marked freedom versus fear, evoking Arab animosity against Western values and prosperity, while bin Laden’s Jihad poised fearful America against his brave warriors, characterizing as well his battle as that of justice versus injustice. Both appealed to God, revealing a similar fundamentalist absolutism and Manicheanism with both characterizing their Other as “evil.” And both sides described their opponents as “terrorists,” convinced that they were right and virtuous while the other side were villains.
Yet it should be made clear that the interpretation of Islam by the al Qaeda network goes against a reading of the Koran that prohibits suicide, violence against children and innocents, and that in no way promises sainthood or eternal happiness to terrorists. Islam, like Christianity, is complex and contested with various schools, branches, and sects. To homogenize Islam is precisely to play the game of bin Laden and his associates who want to construct a Manichean dualism of Islam versus the West. In fact, just as the West is divided into highly complex blocs of competing ideologies, interests, states, regions, and group, so too is Islam and the Arab world highly divided and conflicted. Only by grasping the complexity of the contemporary world can one begin to solve intractable problems like international terrorism.
Bin Laden was quickly elevated into an international media superstar, reviled in the West and deified in parts of the Islamic and Arab world. Books, artifacts, and products bearing his name and image sold around the world. For his fans, he personified resistance to the West and fidelity to Islam, while to his enemies he was the personification of Evil, the antiChrist. Needless to say, entrepreneurs everywhere exploited his image to sell products. On the Internet, one could purchase toilet paper with bin Laden visage and choose from three slogans: "Wipe out bin Laden," "If he wants to attack he can start with my crack," or "If your butt gets to cloddin' just wipe with bin Laden.” In addition, condoms, shooting targets, dartboards, golf balls, voodoo dolls, and violent video games featured bin Laden’s now iconic image. Websites presented bin Laden porn, tasteless cartoons, and computer games where the player could dismember the Al Qaeda terrorist.
Documentaries and news reports circulated endlessly every extent image and footage of bin Laden, shown in either negative or positive contexts, depending on the media venue. Viewing the countless video and images of Osama bin Laden one is struck by his eyes. He never seems to look into the eyes of others or the camera when he speaks. Bin Laden seems to be in another sphere, above and beyond mundane social interaction. His communiques are thus ethereal and bloodless in their presentation, even if their content is highly blood-thirsty, as his eyes look up and away into a transcendent horizon. The Ayatollah Khomeini, by contrast, had contempt, mixed with slight fear, in his eyes that always turned down and away from Westerners who looked at him. The Iran Khomeini’s look away was always dour and rejective, while occasionally one sees a twinkle in bin Laden’s eye, betraying a tell-tale worldliness, before it darts into a beyond that guides and bedevils him.
George W. Bush, by contrast, is known for his propensity to stare directly into other people’s eyes and famously claimed he could eye the Russian president’s soul by looking into his eyes. Bush is good at eye contact with the camera, providing the illusion that he is speaking directly to the people, face to face, while bin Laden is staring out in space and speaking to eternity. To be sure, sometimes the camera catches the vacant and blank Bush whose small eyes point to the littleness within, while other times Bush’s infamous smirk show his snarky and beady eyes to be the signs of arrogance and contempt, although one could also see unknowledgeable insecurity in the trademark smirk.
As the U.S. military campaign unfolded, the Bush administration backed away from personalizing the conflict as one between Bush and bin Laden, perhaps recalling how the first Bush’s presidency collapsed in part because he was not able to remove the personification of evil in the Gulf War, Saddam Hussein, who continued to taunt the U.S. and who many believed supported the al Qaeda terrorist network. In fact, while I have used the term “bin Laden” throughout my analysis, I think that it is a mistake to personalize the September 11 events, or to contribute to the demonization of bin Laden, the flip side of which is deification, that is precisely what he and some of his followers want. “Bin Laden” is better interpreted as what Sorel called a “revolutionary myth,” a figurehead for a network and movement to which his opponents ascribe great power and evil, while his followers ascribe wonderous effectivity and good to the name.
In fact, there appears to be a worldwide radical Islamic theocratic network that has taken up terrorism and “propaganda of the deed” to help produce a Holy War between the East and West, and it appears certain that the problems of terrorism will not be solved by the arrest or elimination of bin Laden and other leaders of his Al Qaeda network who Bush put on top of a “Most Wanted” list on October 10. This list suggests that the war against terrorism will be a long one and raises questions of whether the U.S. military strategy is the most effective way to stop global terrorism, whether terrorism can ever be eliminated in the modern world, and what are the most viable conditions for a world without terror - questions not raised as military fever engulfed the nation in a vise of patriotism in which critical thinking and dissent was seeing as treason.
Yet as the U.S. continued its bombing campaign in October and threatened to expand its enduring war against terrorism to states like Iraq, worries began to circulate that the U.S. military intervention might create more problems than it would solve. When U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld likened the war on terror to the Cold War, which lasted more than fifty years, the specter of endless war was invoked which is perhaps what the Pentagon had in mind when they first named their military intervention “operation infinite justice.” Jokes circulated through the Pentagon that an endless war on terrorism would drag them into “Operation Infinite War.” President Bush regularly referred to World War III in speeches and pledged that he would dedicate his administration to this cause (later it was claimed by a Pakistani journalist who had interviewed bin Laden that the Al Qaeda head also frequently spoke of World War III).
Endless war would no doubt be a hard project to sell the public for the long-term and one wondered how long it would take the costs to overwhelm the benefits. Although war throughout the new millennium would keep America’s troops fully employed and the Pentagon budget ever-escalating, it would keep U.S. citizens in a state of fear from terrorist retaliation, for unending war would no doubt generate endless terror. Moreover, it was not clear how the U.S. could afford to finance an open-ended war against terrorism, nor how the global economy could function in a situation of fear and war.
Indeed, hysteria and panic reigned throughout the U.S. after it was reported on October 8 that the Bush administration believed that a significant terrorist response to their military intervention was certain. Reports of an isolated anthrax case in Florida mushroomed on October 9 when it was reported that a second episode appeared in Florida. Media focus intensified when it was revealed that the site of the infection was a building that housed the National Enquirer and other tabloids which had relentlessly demonized bin Laden, his network, and the Taliban. Reports circulated that a Middle Eastern intern who had worked in the building left a threatening e-mail, while another account indicated that the Sun tabloid had received a “weird love letter to Jennifer Lopez” with a “soapy, powdery substance” and a Star of David charm in the letter, evoking the specter of an anthrax infected postal system that could attack anyone.
Throughout the day of October 9, hysteria in the United States escalated. People were calling the police in when powdery substance appeared in letters and offices, while frantic tabloid representatives tried to assure the public that buying their papers would not expose them to anthrax. There was a run on anthrax antibiotics in Florida and elsewhere and bioterrorism threats closed an IRS Center in Kentucky and a subway in Washington, D.C.[21] And the Internet buzzed with rumors of cyberterror disrupting the great global commerce, culture, and communications network.
Meanwhile, it was appearing that things were not going well on the war front. Although the U.S. could claim to control Afghanistan’s airspace after several days of bombing, this did not amount to much and reports of “collateral damage” were beginning to circulate, including the death of four UN workers purportedly killed by the U.S. assault, and subsequent accounts of U.S. bombing of Afghan civilian neighborhoods. Most ominously, throughout the world there were regional reports of potential worrisome responses to the U.S. military adventure. Pakistan was scarred by riots and there were fears of upheaval and perhaps a long-simmering explosion of tensions with neighboring India; indeed, within days fighting broke out between Indian and Pakistani forces over their long dispute over Kashmir. Moreover, anti-American demonstrations were soon to break out in Pakistan, Egypt, Nigeria, Indonesia, and other countries throughout the Islamic world, causing hundreds of deaths and nurturing hatred of the U.S. that could last for decades. There would be hell to pay and many worried that the al Qaeda threats that Americans would henceforth live in fear became chilling possibilities.
While British and U.S. TV networks had been engaging in relentless war propaganda for the first several days of the bombing, on October 9 both BBC TV in Britain and ABC TV in the U.S. were remarkably critical, citing civilian damage and the killing of UN workers in Afghanistan via U.S. bombing, the anthrax scare and hysteria in the U.S., refugee problems in Afghanistan, and protests in the Arab world, while noting problems with the food deliveries that were supposed to legitimate the intervention and construct it as a humanitarian operation that would benefit the Afghan people. However, UN and other aid workers in Afghanistan appeared on television indicating that the U.S. military intervention had made it impossible for aid agencies to continue their food delivery, that the food delivered by the U.S. was totally inadequate, and that dropping food in mine-laden Afghanistan was highly dangerous to the people.
After the live television broadcast on October 9 of yet another al Qaeda radical threatening more terrorist strikes against the U.S. and asserting that Jihad against America was now “the duty of every Muslim,” Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s National Security Advisor and a rabid unilateralist, had a conference call with top television executives. She implored them to no longer broadcast live bin Laden tapes since they could send “secret messages” to “sleeper” agents and unleash new terror. Even more chilling, Ari Fleischer, head Bushspeak flak, called Howell Raines, executive editor of the New York Times to ask him to refrain from publishing transcripts of statements released by bin Laden and his gang, although Raines’ response was reportedly chilly to the request to freeze information.[22] The previous week Colin Powell had urged the Emir of Qatar, that houses the Arab al Jeezer network that had been releasing al Qaeda tapes, to restrict broadcast of these tapes and the views of bin Laden spokespeople, leading al Jeezer broadcast executives to wonder why the country that invented “freedom of the press” and extolled its “free press” was telling other countries not to exert this right.
The same day Bush testily attacked Congressmen for releasing classified national security information by informing the country that a retaliatory terrorist strike on the U.S. after the beginning of Afghanistan bombing was “100 percent certain.” By the next day, he relented, promising to share security information with Congress and declaring that “our calling” is the eradication of terrorism around the world. Taking a page from his father’s Gulf War book, Bush affirmed that: “Now is the time to draw the line in the sand against the evil doers.”
Also on October 10, Islamic leaders meeting in Qatar questioned the U.S. attacks, and called for the U.S. to only attack those it could prove were involved in the terrorist strikes against the U.S. They also called for a dialogue of civilizations and not extending the war any further. On the previous day, however, UN Ambassador to the UN, John Negroponte, who had been involved himself in funding and arming terrorists in the Iran/Contra scandal of the 1980s, delivered a message to Iraq, threatening them with military action and defeat, causing suspicions that the war would be extended, long, and dangerous.
Moreover, concerns were circulating about how the U.S. could afford to pay for its intervention and the impact of its military intervention on the U.S. and global economy. In October it was reported that there would be no surplus for 2001, that the U.S. would once again plunge into deficit spending as it had during the earlier Reagan-Bush years, and that the entire global economy was in peril because of the turmoil. In response to calls for government spending to help avoid deep recession, the Bush administration responded with a call for a $70 billion additional tax cuts, most of which would be capital gains tax cut for the rich, suggesting again that the Bush administration was largely a criminal enterprise organized to rob the federal treasury of money for its most wealthy contributors and supporters (see Kellner 2001). Their partners in crime, the House Ways and Means Committee, approved a $90 billion stimulus package on October 13, although some Democrats vowed to fight the corporate give-away.[23]
It appeared to many that the war against terrorism was careening out of control and while the mainstream media constantly praised the “confident” and “effective” president, claiming that he had risen to the occasion and was like a new person, others wondered if he was really up to the job and knew what he was doing. After his well-performed speech to Congress on September 20, Bush returned to his bland teleprompter mode and erratic mode of spontaneous, albeit scripted, public communication. In a verbal slip not generally noted in the media, on October 4, Bush wound up a speech on the rough and long road ahead needed to defeat terrorism by proclaiming: “And there is no doubt in my mind, not one doubt in my mind, that we will fail” (Los Angeles Times, Oct 5, 2001). In several mid-October speeches that had obviously been written that morning by his speech-writers and that Bush did not have sufficient time to fully understand, he returned to his reading-a-speech-that-may-be-beyond-me mode, nose buried in text and then furtively darting his eyes around the audience as if to say, “Do they know that I don’t understand what I’m reading?” while seeking approval. When the audience claps or responds appropriately, Bush smirks knowing that he’d pulled off his performance.
As the second week of saturation bombing of Afghanistan continued, reports began surfacing that all was not going well and that the Bush administration was not sure how to proceed. U.S. generals were frustrated that their bombing had not flushed out more Taliban/al Qaeda, although Seymour Hersh reported that CIA sources indicated that U.S. forces had missed an opportunity to get Taliban leader Omar’s caravan the first night of the bombing, but were unable to decide if they should target him. Other reports through the weekend of October 13-14 documented U.S. bombing of a village that killed scores, with pictures of dead Afghan children and women circulating through the global media.[24]
Diplomats realized that the U.S. was losing the propaganda war, and belatedly the U.S. started dropping leaflets explaining the reasons they were attacking the Taliban and explaining the benefits for Afghanistan if the Taliban were overthrown. But bombs had been dropping on Afghanistan for over a week and the U.S. propagandists had generally failed to grasp that every time a picture of a dead Muslim was shown in the global media, the entire Muslim world feels violated, that every bombing of civilians exponentially increased hatred of Americans in the world and furthered the possibilities of terrorist retaliation in the future. There were also reports circulating that Afghanistan faced a starvation problem of an immense magnitude, that as many as 7.5 million people could waste away as the relentless Afghan winter approached and the bombing and flow of refugees continued unabated. Thus, although the U.S. had started off with a propaganda offensive that they were dropping bread and bombs, that their military intervention was humanitarian and that they would feed the Afghan people, so far only the results of bombing were visible to the world and images of murdered, mutilated and starving people were circulating through the global media.
As Colin Powell traveled to Pakistan for a meeting to reassure the country’s ruling generals who had allowed the U.S. to use its landing facilities and airspace in the Afghanistan bombing campaign, merchants in Pakistan went on strike to protest U.S. military support in the country. An Islamic group had been brutally turned away from attacking a U.S. airbase in Pakistan over the weekend and violent demonstrations continued against the U.S. intervention throughout the Muslim world, with scores dying in Nigeria. Bombings of civilian targets continued, on October 16 the U.S. hit a Red Cross Depot, with Bush administration spokesman first denying that the U.S. had hit the installation and then the Pentagon admitted it. Civilian neighborhoods continued to be “collateral damage,” and the Taliban claimed that the U.S. bombed a caravan of civilians fleeing the war on October 17.
Meanwhile, Afghanistan appeared to be in chaos. Taliban gangs robbed UN food depots and supplies of medicine, international aid agencies begged for a halt in the bombing to feed the famished people, refugees fled to neighboring countries, and internally the civil war intensified with advances by the Northern Alliance countered by what was claimed to be fierce Taliban resistance. There were also stories of thousands of young Islam militants flooding into Afghanistan from neighboring countries to fight the U.S. in a Jihad and demonstrations intensified throughout the Islamic world. Surveys revealed that alarming numbers of individuals in the Islamic world believed that Israel or the U.S. itself was responsible for the September 11 terrorist attacks, viewed bin Laden as a hero, and declared themselves passionately against the U.S. military intervention. Critics worried about the stability of the region, anticipating possible Islamic upheavals in Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and other states in the region that had large and angry Islamic populations.[25]
The worldwide turbulence from the U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan was largely unnoticed by the U.S. public as the media were obsessed with the anthrax attacks that were apparently intensifying. Reports multiplied of individuals being exposed to anthrax powder through the mail, and false alarms or hoaxes reaped hysteria in homes and offices everywhere, as well as airplanes or public spaces where panic erupted when suspicious white powder was found. More anthrax was discovered at NBC, ABC, and then CBS, forcing the shutdown of these media institutions for health inspections, and guaranteeing that anthrax would be the story of the week. NBC’s Tom Brokow dramatized his own participation in the anthrax drama, closing a broadcast with a grim smile and declaration that “In Cipro we trust,” holding a bottle of the anti-bacteria drug that was being prescribed for those exposed to anthrax. It appears that in the home of the free and the brave trust in drugs had replaced trust in the Big Guy, while some public health experts argued that the current craze for Cipro could be highly harmful to individuals and that the more modest drug penicillin might be more effective.[26]
The U.S. Congress as well was exposed to anthrax and shut down. On October 15, it was discovered that a package of anthrax with a threatening letter was sent to the office of Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (Dem-SD), and his aide was exposed and tested positive. On October 17, it was claimed that this form of anthrax was extremely sophisticated and lethal, that over 30 other Senate aides had been exposed and tested positive, and the House Majority leader announced that anthrax was found “in the ventilation system” of the Senate building as well. Later in the day, government officials claimed that the anthrax was “garden-variety” grade and that the Senate ventilation system had not been infected, but when the House and Senate announced that both were being closed for the rest of the week to allow full-scale inspection, obviously something was happening.
Indeed, this was the first time that Congress had ever been closed down during a scheduled session. Bizarrely, House Leaders disparaged grandstanding Senators for remaining open for their afternoon session, while members of the Senate denigrated the House for prematurely closing down and the rightwing New York Post featured a bold-faced WIMPS on their headline with pictures of the House leaders. Hence, a war broke out between the House and Senate over how to deal with the anthrax exposures and scares, with the Bush administration still failing to adequately inform even elected U.S. representatives.
The following Monday anthrax was found in both the House and Senate buildings, and the House of Representatives’ caution was no longer questioned. Indeed, throughout the world, anthrax scares and hoaxes multiplied at an astonishing rate. Over 100 letters claiming to contain anthrax were sent to family planning and abortion clinics across the U.S., replaying a 1998 and 1999 campaign when similar tactics were used, leading to speculation that some of the actual anthrax attacks might have been carried out by U.S. rightwing domestic groups, or deranged extremists or psychotics. From Hong Kong to Italy, from Kenya to Sydney, there were announcements that anthrax powder had been found, jets all around the globe landed prematurely when suspicious substances were found on planes, and hoaxes, panic, and hysteria proliferated, globalization at work in its more sinister and bizarre forms.
By October 18, It was clear that the Bush administration were as ineptly handling the domestic anthrax war as they were the terrorist war abroad. There seemed to be no coordination among federal and local agencies on the anthrax attacks, no national policies, and a highly ham-fisted response. The Secretary of Health and Human Services, Tommy Thompson, first dismissed the discovery of the Florida anthrax case at the tabloid media center as the result of a “natural” spore, perhaps encountered while fishing, and nothing to be alarmed at. Later, of course, it was revealed that this was a severe problem and Thompson was seriously discredited. Thompson, who was caught up in mis-statements and confusion during the summer stem cell debate, and was himself associated with the University of Wisconsin consortium that would benefit from the Bush administration decision, appeared to be more interested in protecting the patent rights of the anthrax vaccine company which had failed to provide adequate supply and the company that made the antidote Cipro than U.S. citizens threatened by the attack. He obviously did not have the scientific qualifications for the job and was not effective in communicating with the public during the initial phase of the anthrax scare. Indeed, he was himself quickly taken out of the public spotlight, acknowledging that the Bush administration had appointed a conservative corporate flunkey as head of the Department of Health and Human Services when someone more competent in health and human services was required.
Moreover, days went by before there was thorough investigation of the Florida site where anthrax was first found and where it turned out that many employees were exposed. The same pattern evolved at NBC, where at first federal authorities failed to thoroughly investigate the incident and allowed days to go by before closing offices for a methodical investigation. The New York Mayor Rudy Guiliani was so outraged by the FBI that he ordered them out of the investigation of the New York anthrax attacks, and made it a New York Police affair.
The head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), Joe Albrow, an incompetent and bumbling member of Bush’s Texas “Iron Triangle” who had proven himself an able political hatchet man for Bush over the years, was not visible to the public during the anthrax crisis. Nor, for some time, was Bush’s new Head of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge, another Bush political crony whose competence was in doubt. Dick Cheney, previously the head of the Bush administration group on antiterrorism, but obviously more interested in collecting tax breaks and government favors for his oil industry buddies, was almost invisible. Cheney’s few public comments on anthrax were contradictory and muddled, as were the daily comments of the ultraright and not-too-bright Attorney General John Ashcroft. Attorney General Ashcroft had lost a senate election to a dead man in 2000, was generally considered the most rightwing extremist of a hardright Bush administration, and was about to undertake the most radical assault on civil liberties and rights in U.S. history. For, as we shall see, Ashcroft’s response to the terrorist attacks were to push through the most repressive law and order legislation imaginable, an extreme rightwing wet dream of government surveillance, arrest and seizure that had moderate conservatives as well as liberals worried.[27]
Bush administration officials tried to assure the public regarding the anthrax attacks on October 19, but the media kept hyping and dramatizing public hysteria, providing all-anthrax-all-day coverage, just as with media spectacles like the O.J. Simpson trial and Clinton and Condit sex scandals. Tom Ridge and John Ashcroft tried to reassure the public, but they were highly ineffectual, merely noting that the U.S. was offering a million dollar award for information concerning who sent out the anthrax in the mail. They at first tried to assure the public that there were plenty of drugs on hand to treat the disease and other potential plagues. But soon, the Bush administration were forced to admit that drugs dealing with lethal biochemical diseases were in short supply and the public health system could not cope with wide-spread crisis. While some Senators tried to calm the public by indicating that there was little chance they would be exposed to anthrax, that the spores were hard to spread through mass areas, that the symptoms could be treated, and the like, the media created immense hysteria with hypes of every account, many rumors, and repeated warnings about the disease and what to do.
Put in perspective, every day Americans and others are exposed to thousands of toxic organisms and diseases, many die daily from such often mysterious causes, and rarely is attention focused on the deadly byproducts of everyday life in the modern world. But the anthrax scare had created a nation of hypochondriacs and the media were producing a great panic scare, one that was paralyzing the economy and polity. For there was an investigation with media hype every time white powder was found in office buildings, public spaces or transportation vehicles, or homes. Police and public health officials were being heavily overburdened with white powder chases, much of which turned out to be talcum powder or doughnut sugar.
Yet
more and more anthrax traces were found in U.S. government buildings ranging
from the Supreme Court, to the Justice Department, to the White House mail
room, and everyday exposures and deaths from anthrax expanded. Meanwhile, Bush
himself verged from the Andover cheerleader mode where one day he told people
to go on with their lives, that everything would be OK, and that the government
was in control. Then he or others in his administration would give up warnings
that there were serious threats to the public that required alertness and that
the war against terrorism would go on for years. One day the President would
assert that although “our nation is still in danger,” “the government is doing
everything in our power to protect our citizenry.” Bush told the country that
Americans could help fight back by “going to work, going to ball games, getting
on airplanes, singing with joy and strength, like you all did today. They will
not take this country down!,” he proclaimed as his audience cheered (Newsweek,
October 22, 2001).
Most bizarrely, when asked in a White House briefing if he had been tested for anthrax, Bush curtly answered, “I don’t have anthrax,” repeating the answer twice when reporters queried him about dangers of anthrax in the White House. But when questioned as to whether the bin Laden network was behind the anthrax attacks, Bush would respond, “I wouldn’t put it past him,” and then lash out against “the evil doers,” the “new dangers” facing Americans, and the need for vigilance and patience. The FBI had labeled the threatened major terrorist attacks “Skyfall,” which elicited hundreds of frightened calls that forced the FBI to pull the warning from its website and rethink its linguistic politics. And the fact that Vice-President Dick Cheney was kept secured in “an undisclosed secure location,” rumored to be a mountain hide-away outside of Washington, did not help to breed confidence.
Wildly conflicting stories as to the source of the anthrax attacks circulated through the media. Certain members of the Bush administration, eager to attack Iraq, continued to leak to the media that Iraq was behind the attacks, claims circulating through media from the National Enquirer to ABC News. The British Guardian reported on October 24 that the U.S. was closer to blaming anthrax on al-Qaeda, “the operating suspicion on the White House for a considerable period of time” and frequently insinuated by Bush. But in a Washington Post article, Bob Woodward and Dan Eggen report that “FBI and CIA Suspect Domestic Extremists. Officials Doubt any Links to Bid Laden” (October 27) - a report that was instantly questioned by many. Speculation continued to circulate concerning the possibility of a home-grown rightwing source, with domestic terrorism expert David Neiwert writing a long history of U.S. rightwing fascination with the drug, attempted use of it, and motives and inclinations to attack the U.S. government and the media sources that had been most exposed to it (“Homegrown terror,” October 26, 2001, syndicated). Indeed, no conservative politicians or rightwing media like Fox had been exposed to anthrax during the opening weeks of the anthrax exposures, and eventually the FBI would attribute the anthrax mailings to a domestic disgruntled loner or extremist.
Eventually, U.S. government sources also admitted that Cipro was not the only drug useful to fight anthrax, but was also not necessarily the most efficient. Cheaper drugs, such as penicillin and doxycycline, were deemed to be as effective as the more expensive and harder to get Cipro, and perhaps had less noxious side-effects. In fact, the only testing on Cipro had been on monkeys and it wasn’t clear what strains the drug would treat, the side-effects, or if it would make individuals resistant. Earlier, during the Gulf war, troops had been given anthrax vaccines that had not been adequately tested, so in effect Gulf troops were guinea pigs, with disquieting results. For many feared that the anthrax vaccines had contributed to the “Gulf war syndrome,” which adversely affected thousands of Gulf war veterans, ranging from tumors to mysterious flulike illness (see Kellner 1992 and Hersh 1998). Now there was a rush to approval of a range of anthrax drugs by the FDA, so that U.S. citizens could serve as a round of guinea pigs for the anthrax exposures proliferating in the U.S.
The great anthrax mystery grew as different experts and intelligence personnel weighed in on one of the most remarkable terrorist attacks in history. The viability of the U.S. postal service was in question and the Bush administration continued to suffer a credibility deficit. The hapless Tommy Thompson was kept out of the public after his stumbling performance, and the Bush administration officials put out daily to explain the anthrax attacks to the public, including Attorney General John Ashcroft, Homeland Defense Secretary Tom Ridge and Postmaster General John Potter, were hardly reassuring. Ashcroft especially gave the nation the willies with his constant warnings of impending doom and inability to provide a coherent explanation of impending and actual terrorist attacks and the U.S. response. The most rightwing member of the government, the dour Ashcroft’s voice trembled as he moralistically condemned the terrorists, but failed to reassure that anything was being done to protect the public. Some speculated that Ashcroft’s own ultraright history made him singularly unable to go after potential domestic terrorists, whom many speculated were behind the anthrax attacks. And civil libertarians and liberals shuddered to think that this rightwing ideologue would be in charge of administering new antiterrorist laws that gave the government new powers of search and seizure, detention, and prosecution. In the war against the Taliban, the U.S. Taliban was determining policy and the consequences were worrisome.
Tom Ridge and John Potter, on the other hand, appeared as pudgy and overage football players, who would be more at home reliving their glory days on the gridiron over a couple of beers than having to deal with complex scientific health and public relations issues. The post office was severely criticized for failing to test its employees when government and media employees exposed to anthrax had been tested and if necessary given drugs and medical treatment. Post Office worker unions were suing the government and the country increased its panic when anthrax exposures started appearing in people not in proximity to the previously noted anthrax-saturated letters. The stumbling Potter was hardly reassuring when he admitted that the Post Office could not guarantee that customer mail was safe, and Ridge seemed out of his element as he mumbled and bumbled day after day, trying to assure a nervous public when it was obvious that the Bush administration was stumped by the anthrax mystery. When the FBI director begged the public to help them solve the anthrax problem, it was clear that the U.S. government was unable to do its job.
Thus Bush administration officials such as Ridge, Thompson, and Potter began to look more and more like the three stooges as they stumbled daily through their briefings, gave out contradictory messages, and signaled the incompetence of the Bush administration to deal with the grave national domestic crisis. Part of the problem with the failure of Bush administration officials to deal with domestic terrorism is that they did not have the intelligence, credentials, or capability to do the job. As the days went by, the dim-bulb Ashcroft became dimmer, his eyes more vacuous and his voice ever-trembling. Hands shaking, his nasal-droning voice and grim visage became the face of Bush administration inability to competently deal with the terror crisis. This was the price of Bush administration ideological cronyism where Bush and his handlers choose conservative white men to carry out important government jobs, the kind that W. was comfortable with and who were inclined to support hardright conservative policies and give favors to the corporate donors who would keep the cash flowing to Republican troughs. But the country was paying heavily for the cronyism and corruption that put unqualified conservative men in jobs that they were obviously not competent to handle.
Put into historical context, the anthrax attacks could also be read as blowback from the insanity of the Cold War and failure of the superpowers and global community to control the spreading of instruments of biological terror. Both the United States and the Soviet Union had developed massive chemical weapons programs utilizing lethal substances like anthrax, and although its production and use had been banned, there had not been sufficient attention paid to controlling and containing the circulation of the product - or, for that matter, other lethal viruses like smallpox that had been eradicated as a medical danger by a successful worldwide vaccination program. But the smallpox virus had continued to be cultivated in research labs, perhaps for use in government biological weapons programs, and there were fears that the virus had been stolen by terrorists and would be used against the American public.
The country was also experiencing blowback from decades of FBI incompetence and mediocrity. Obviously, the FBI had failed to prevent the September 11 attacks, although there was a shocking report circulating on the Internet that the Justice Department had been warned of an impending attack by Chicago Attorney David Schippers, head of the Clinton impeachment. Schippers asserted on the Alex Jones radio show that the Justice department had detailed information on 9/11 weeks before the attack was carried out, claiming that he personally sent information about the impending September 11 attack to Attorney General Ashcroft asking for an investigation, but he refused to do anything. Schippers alleged that he received his information from FBI agents who had collected information about the impending attack and the terrorists subsequently involved, but that it was ignored. Indeed, Carolyn Kay assembled scores of warnings from Russian, Israeli, German, U.S. and other intelligence sources warning that a major domestic terrorist attack was about to unfold against the U.S. but the Bush administration and the National (In)security Apparatus failed to respond (see http://makethemaccountable.com/whatwhen/index.html).
Thus, despite copious warnings that many foreign and domestic agencies had informed the U.S. government about impending terrorist attacks, there was obviously no competent centralized intelligence, no one qualified to process the data, and so the intelligence services failed to serve the nation that had so liberally funded them. The FBI was also appearing to blunder again in the anthrax investigation and for months after September 11 had failed to make arrests in either the terrorist attacks or the anthrax episodes which decisively caught the perpetrators; although the Feds had arrested over 1,200 suspects in conjunction with the September 11 events, the Los Angeles Times reported that as of November 16 “None Jailed Linked to Attacks.” Part of the problem was that the conservative white FBI agents that were traditionally the core of the agency had no cultural ability to interact with people of color and there were few agents who grasped the complexity of Middle Eastern culture, could speak or read Arabic, or otherwise cleverly interrogate suspects. Moreover, there were acute basic questions about FBI competency and intelligence.
Earlier in 2001,
there had been a series of scandals in which the FBI botched major
investigations, including revelations that the agency had lost loads of
documents involved in the Timothy McVeigh Oklahoma City bombings, surely the
most publicized Bureau case of the 1990s. It was revealed as well that the FBI
had not centralized computer records, and had no centralized computer databases
with federal law enforcement agencies, the IMS, or other government agencies.
In a high-tech era, the FBI was clearly technology-challenged. In fact, it was
revealed in a Congressional investigation of the anthrax exposures that the
government had destroyed many of the original samples and types of anthrax
before it could be properly analyzed. And in a November Congressional hearing,
an FBI agent was forced to admit that they really did not know who had access
to anthrax in labs in the U.S., which labs were experimenting with it, what
sort of clearance lab workers had, and what strains had been available to
different labs.
Consequently, public confidence was declining in the government’s ability to manage the crisis at home and abroad. Washington, D.C. had never been under such bizarre and unpredictable attacks in the history of the Republic, and its citizens were ever more anxious and fearful of lethal terrorist attacks, the immanence of which the Attorney General John Ashcroft continually warned the people. His dour, pinched face and droning, flat voice was becoming an icon of impending doom, and whenever he appeared on television, the public rightfully became alarmed that malevolent forces were adrift in the land, and that all was not well with such characters in government who were unlikely to protect the public and would no doubt make things worse.
On the weekend of November 10-11, reports circulated that “Anthrax Letters Likely Sent by Angry Male Loner, FBI Says (Washington Post, Nov. 10, 2001). Based on hand-writing analysis of the three letters sent to NBC, the New York Post, and Tom Daschle, the FBI was now concluding that “we have a lone individual operating in these incidents.” If true, the U.S. was facing a Unabomber-situation, which had taken 18 years to catch the sender of bombs through the mail which had killed and maimed many. This hypothesis was strengthened by the revelation on November 16 that a newly discovered letter was found sent to liberal Democratic senator Patrick Leahy. If it was true an extremist loner was the anthrax attack culprit, as the FBI again suggested, then one wonders on what basis George W. Bush had repeatedly insinuated that the anthrax was being sent by Al Qaeda, although the paralyzing effects and terror of the anthrax exposure due to hysterical media presentation had no doubt sent the message to many terrorist enemies of the U.S. that this would be an effective instrument of terror.
Some ugly tensions begin to emerge on the home front. On November 2, New York firefighters demonstrated when they heard that officials had apparently decided that once the missing gold was found in the bowels of the World Trade Center, the careful hunt for bodies and material could halt, and bulldozers could be used to clean up the rest of the mess. Firefighters were angry, however, because there were still some of their comrades lost in the rubble and they had been ordered away from the site, while they wanted to continue to dig for human remains. In an ugly clash with police, several fire-fighters were arrested, though New York city officials tried to paper over the conflict and did allow the firefighters to continue to search for missing bodies that were carefully removed and not bulldozed.
As tensions continued to multiply on the domestic front and no good news emerged from the battlefront, pundits were quietly calling Bush’s war “Operation Infinite Disaster.” As the war entered its third week, there was already talk of a “quagmire,” a la Vietnam, there were worries that the U.S. strategy was not working, that the Arab world was pulling behind the Taliban and radical Islam, creating hoards of future enemies, and that things would get worse before they would get better.
After two weeks of bombing, the results were not clear. Old-fashioned B-52’s saturated large areas with explosive munitions, while winged B-2 Bombers aloft for days flew from the U.S. to drop bombs directed by Global Positioning System Satellites with mixed results. With its 172-foot wingspan, these giant flying birds deployed Joint Direct Attack Munitions (J-DAM) to fire an array of weapons. Heavy AC-130 gunships armed with howitzers, cannon, and machine guns blasted allegedly Taliban camps and material, while land-based F-15Es hit Taliban positions, with giant fuel-air explosive “bunker bombs” used to blow up munitions dumps and possible mountain and tunnel hide-outs.
Military theoreticians described the conflict as “asymmetrical” as the Taliban had no sophisticated weaponry or modern military organization. While the U.S. military claimed that they were destroying Taliban “command and control” centers, there was really no command or control, in the sense usually used by the contemporary military. The videos showed daily in U.S. military briefings depicted U.S. bombs hitting obscure buildings or vehicles, but it wasn’t clear that these were really military targets, or that the Taliban had a military force in the conventional sense, or that real progress was being made in the daily bombing attacks.
Moreover, while during the first two weeks of bombing, the U.S. attacks had destroyed many seemingly military targets on the ground in Afghanistan, it had also hit many civilian facilities, including a Red Cross and UN supplies depot, generating many pictures of wounded or murdered Afghan children, and destroyed civilian houses. These pictures circulated daily throughout the world, and were turning public opinion against the U.S. intervention, especially in the Islamic world where large anti-war demonstrations were a regular feature of everyday life and threats against Americans in the area escalated. Likewise, the flood of refugees was producing heart-breaking images of people fleeing war and facing disease and starvation. Aid agencies continued to plea for a bombing halt so that food could be delivered to refugees, but the bombing continued unabated into a third and then a fourth and fifth week, with apparent set-backs for the U.S.-backed Northern Alliance forces and few appreciable gains.
On the weekend of October 20-21, drama in the theater of war intensified with accounts of helicopter assaults on Taliban positions, Special Ops forces landing seeking Taliban and al Qaeda forces, and the beginning of a longer, more complex campaign. There was much speculation that this was the beginning of a ground war in which U.S. troops would rout the Taliban, but later reports indicated that the Special Ops raid had not garnered significant intelligence in the raid and that the U.S. forces were having extreme difficulty in locating their Taliban and al Qaeda targets. Moreover, during the next two weeks there were no more significant, or announced Special Ops activities, until reports two weeks later that a U.S. helicopter on mission had crashed due to bad weather, resulting in several injuries.
The same weekend there was media buzz about a publication by Seymour Hersh that the Special Ops group that had attacked a Taliban complex which held a house used by Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader, had suffered heavy Taliban fire wounding many, and helping discourage further operations. The failure allegedly discouraged future use of Special Operation units, with one Delta Force soldier telling a colleague that “the planners ‘think we can perform fucking magic. We can’t. Don’t put us in an environment we weren’t prepared for. Next time, we’re going to lose a company’” (The New Yorker, Nov. 12, 2001).
There were few solid reports of what was happening on the ground, but it was clear that the daily bombing was ongoing and civilian casualties continued to mount. AC-130s were equipped with loudspeakers telling the Taliban that they will be destroyed if they did not surrender. “You will be attacked by land, sea, and airŠ Resistance is futile,” the messages boomed, sounding like the Star Trek Borg warning mere humans of impending doom. New armed unmanned aircraft, the RQ-1 Predators, were reportedly in the field, armed with Hellfire antitank missiles, although reports emerged that bad weather was limited their effectiveness and some were crashing. Reports that an even larger and longer-range unmanned surveillance aircraft armed with missiles, the RQ-4A Global Hawk, that could bring weapons from the U.S. to the other side of the world, might be in action. Obviously, Afghanistan would be a testing ground for new weapons and strategies that would help to replace actual men with machine satellite guided planes, taking “postmodern war” and the “revolution in military affairs” to a higher level.
There were stories that the Taliban were disintegrating under the military attacks, but counter-rumors persisted that they were strong and defiant. There were also reports that the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance was ready to march on Kabul and take over the capital city, although U.S. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld admitted in an October 19 press conference that the Northern Alliance rebels were not yet strong enough to defeat the Taliban, that the U.S. connections with anti-Taliban forces were not tight enough, and that the Taliban were appearing stronger than anticipated in their resistance. Moreover, when asked if the war against terrorism would have to be fought in countries outside of Afghanistan, Rumsfeld answered, “There’s no doubt in my mind,” thus promising that World War Three would be a long and violent one.
When on October 21, U.S. assaults on the Taliban front lines intensified, speculation began that the Northern alliance was preparing for an offensive on Kabul. As the fighting intensified, streams of refugees headed for the Pakistan border and a human crisis was building as 15,000 Afghans trapped at the border were denied entry to Pakistan. Preparing for the long-haul and a lot of bad publicity, the Pentagon hired the public relations firm Rendon Group to try to spin a more positive image to win the hearts and minds of the Afghan people. And the U.S. government hired advertising agency executive Charlotte Beers to serve as an undersecretary of state for public diplomacy. Ms. Beers had specialized in fine-tuning brand names for big corporations and there was speculation concerning how the new U.S.A brand would be defined.
So far, U.S. attempts at shaping world opinion had been disastrous. Although the initial U.S. spin was that the Afghan operations was dropping bread and bombs, combining military with humanitarian operations, the food effort had been a dismal failure, with few of the food packets reaching the population, according to aid agencies on the ground, while starvation and famine increased. By early November, aid agencies predicted that between 6-7.5 million civilians were at risk of starvation with 600,000 on the edge of survival (Los Angeles Times, Nov. 3: A11). Moreover, there were daily heart-wrenching pictures of dead women and children, circulating through the global media, producing a very negative image of the U.S. intervention. As Salon commentators noted:
The AP photos that appeared in the New York Times on Monday were heartbreaking: Afghan men, including a father, weeping over the lifeless bodies of four small children, killed by errant American bombs. Coming on top of last week's reports that American planes had accidentally bombed a Red Cross facility in Kabul for the second time in as many weeks, the images forced the world to confront one of the most painful issues connected with any war and an extraordinarily sensitive one in this war civilian casualties.
To date, human rights groups have confirmed that American bombs dropped on Afghanistan have resulted in at least 48 civilian deaths. America's enemy, the Taliban, has claimed hundreds if not thousands have been killed figures the United States asserts are vastly exaggerated for propaganda purposes. But for much of the Islamic world, already deeply suspicious of America's motives and rectitude, any civilian casualties are evidence that the U.S. campaign is not against terrorism but against Islam itself. . . . (Nov. 1, 2001).
The world media were full of reports of the U.S. bombing of civilians throughout Afghanistan where innocents had been killed in the bombing, with the Human Rights Watch claiming that 23 noncombatants died on October 21 in the village of Thori, six hours from Kandahar.[28] Shockingly, there were stories and pictures of U.S. cluster bombs being dropped on Afghan villages, killing people with unexploded shells. Cluster bombs expel as many as two hundred small bomblets scattered over a large area the size of two football fields to maximize killing. Many of the bomblets do not explode upon landing and later kill people who have the bad fortune to encounter them, much as with unexploded land mines. Unexploded cluster bomb shells were still killing people years later in Iraq and Kosovo and many international agencies, such as Amnesty International, had called for the banning of the bombs; the Geneva convention had outlawed cluster bombs, while a 1999 Ottawa agreement signed by Britain, France, and 140 other nations banned the antipersonnel weapons. When interrogated about the U.S. use of these vicious devices, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld gruffly replied that of course we are using cluster bombs, and of course the purpose is “to try to kill themŠ to be perfectly blunt,” as if the very question was an impertinence (Washington Post, Nov. 2: A01).[29]
The cluster bomb problem, however, was significant enough for the U.S. propagandists to send leaflets advising the Afghan people not to pick up the yellow cluster bombs, and telling them how to distinguish cylinder-shaped cluster bombs from the rectangular food packages which were also yellow. The semiotics division decided to resolve the problem by changing the color of the food packets, rather than to discontinue the use of cluster bombs, a munition that was leading to increasing protests over the tactics and weapons being used by U.S. forces and the harm to Afghan civilians.
A senior citizens home outside of the western Afghanistan city of Herat was bombed on October 23 and the Red Cross facility in Kabul that had earlier been bombed was bombed again on October 26. A Red Crescent facility, the Islamic equivalent of the Red Cross, was bombed, as was a bus, killing 8 or 10 civilians. And on October 31, there were reports that U.S. jets had damaged a Kandahar hospital. By the end of October, it was claimed that the U.S. was targeting electricity plants, water facilities, and transportation, which would return Afghanistan to premodern conditions.
There was a disconnect between Pentagon briefings with their generally upbeat assessments and meaningless showing of videos hitting obscure targets and the daily pictures of civilian Afghan casualties and the sufferings of refugees. The juxtaposition of Rumsfeld and his Pentagon generals bragging about military exploits, or explaining away their mishaps, over and against pictures of suffering Afghans creating extremely negative images of the U.S. Masters of War. Rumsfeld especially was alternately testy and arrogant with reporters, as if any questioning of the wisdom of the U.S. military was out of line - a position indeed taken by conservative commentators. Moreover, as Senator Joe Biden (Dem.-Del.) courageously stated, the U.S. was appearing as “high-tech bullies” against the primitively armed Taliban with innocent Afghan civilians as the victims by bombing them day after day without risking U.S. ground troops.
There was extensive media coverage at the end of October that the U.S. bombing had destroyed an entire village, Chowkar-Karez, in the vicinty of Kandahar. The Taliban took international journalists on a tour of the village and there were many pictures of destroyed buildings, families mourning their dead, and outrage at the U.S. bombing. The Pentagon at first refused to comment and then said that they had reports that there was a significant Taliban meeting going on and that they had seen a caravan of cars driving to the village. But a local resident said that he and his family were escaping from Kandahar, subject to intensive U.S. bombing, and that the vehicles were civilian and not military, creating another public relations disaster for the U.S.[30]
In neighboring Pakistan, the world was horrified on Sunday October 28 when 16 Christians were massacred by Islamic militants during a church service. Hatred was obviously boiling over and the danger was growing that the military conflict could explode into war between Muslims and Christians and Jews. Bin Laden continued to issue calls for Muslims to engage in Jihad and members of the Taliban repeated the call.
Things were also not going well for U.S. forces in the battlefield. On October 26, it was announced that fabled Afghan warrior Abdul Haq had been killed trying to organize his tribesmen in eastern Afghanistan against the Taliban. Declared a “heroic freedom fighter” by Ronald Reagan, Haq was a leader of mujahideen resistance against the Soviets and was one of the major hopes for Americans in helping to create a government structure after the envisaged fall of the Taliban. On October 23, Haq and some associates crossed the Pakistan border, sneaking into Afghanistan to rally opposition to the Taliban. On October 25, Haq and a small band were surrounded by the Taliban and a fierce fight broke out. Haq telephoned his associates in Pakistan who called contacts in the U.S. who sought to get U.S. military help to save him from capture. Although there were reports of an armed drone firing at the Taliban, Haq was taken into custody and murdered, a poignant symbol of the American inability to control the situation in Afghanistan and organize a viable political alternative.[31]
Reports began to circulate again that thousands of volunteers were pouring into Afghanistan for Holy War against the U.S. and that anti-Muslim outrage against the U.S. intervention was growing both from within the U.S. and Europe and in the Muslim world. Pakistanis shot down a U.S. military helicopter inside Pakistan and there were worries that increasing hostility to the U.S. bombing campaign within Pakistan could destabilize the Pakistani government and obviously U.S. troops in Pakistan were in constant danger.
It was not clear, moreover, that the U.S. was making any progress in destroying al Qaeda. On October 24, in a U.S.A Today interview, Rumsfeld admitted that they did not know if they would ever find bin Laden, that it was like “looking for a needle in a haystack.” Soon after, however, Rumsfeld backtracked and said that they “we hope and we expect to get him.” Moreover, Bush continued to bluster that they were going to “smoke out” the “evil ones” from their caves and “bring them to justice.”
Criticisms were beginning to mount from the right concerning what was seen as the insufficiency and failures of the U.S. campaign. Senator John McCain (Rep-Ariz.) argued that the U.S. needed to send in a significant amount of ground troops against the Taliban and not just rely on air war. Conservative columnist William Kristol criticized the Bush administration for trying to fight a war with “half measures” and a writer for the liberal New Republic called upon the U.S. to first and foremost “destroy the instrument of aggression” and then worry about the political situation in Afghanistan. One time liberal Geraldo Rivera cajoled Henry Kissinger that the U.S. was not being tough enough in going after the terrorists and announced in early November that he was quitting his cushy MSNBC cable job to become a war correspondent for Fox in the Afghan crusade.
Military analysts remarked that the U.S. operation appeared almost identical to the air wars fought in Iraq and Kosovo with daily heavy bombings from the air, mounting civilian casualties, uncertainty concerning how the bombing campaign would end, and worries that there was no well-thought out endgame. Reports circulated that there was an “intelligence vacuum” on the ground concerning the whereabouts of Taliban and al Qaeda members and bad weather seemed to be blocking special operations troops from working effectively within the country. There were criticisms that the head of the U.S. military intervention, General Tommy Franks, was “plodding and unimaginative,” and that “the overall effort seems slow off the mark and pretty inadequate.” There were also reports that in England “senior ministers” spoke “disparagingly” of Franks, dismissing him as “an artillery man,” reluctant to commit infantry.[32]
There were also daily criticisms from the Northern Alliance forces in Afghanistan that the U.S. was not doing enough and that the U.S. bombing was not really helping them in their efforts to overthrow the Taliban. When the U.S. started to use B-52s for carpet bombing of Taliban positions in early November, the Northern Alliance claimed that the bombs were poorly targeted and missed key Taliban forces. One Alliance leader had the temerity to complain that the American use of heavy bombers to strike Taliban positions “was a largely futile enterprise. He said the American officials planning the campaign appeared to be disregarding the advice of the Afghans who know better. ‘Mr. Rumsfeld chooses the target in AmericaŠ This is our country. We know it best. If I were the defense minister of America, I could use his weapons better than he.’”[33]
The U.S. was equally critical of the Northern Alliance which had not gained any ground on the Taliban since the U.S. had begun its bombing campaign a month before. U.S. forces complained that the Northern Alliance was not showing significant initiative, that they had overestimated their Afghan allies’ abilities, and that the Northern Alliance had been “underwhelming” in the fight so far. When asked if the U.S. trusted the Northern Alliance, the U.S. regional military commander Tommy Franks responded “we’re not sure,” and there was constant bickering between the supposed allies that was leaked to the world press, starved for any frontline news about the progress of the war.
Britain’s Prime Minister Tony Blair, the major U.S. cheerleader, had also had a bad week in what was seen as a disastrous trip to the Middle East. While in a joint press conference with Syria’s President Assad on November 1, Blair was forced to hear a lecture, played on television throughout the world, that the U.S./Britain bombing campaign was causing "thousands" of civilian casualties, while Assad lauded Palestinian terrorists as "freedom fighters". After similarly unproductive trips to Saudi Arabia and Jordan, Blair was received frostily in Israel where the Sharon administration refused to back his call for an end to the “cycle of violence” between the Israelis and the Palestinians which many believed would be one of the ultimate keys to a lasting Middle Eastern settlement. The Bush administration had been singularly uninvolved in resolving this dispute, but the well-meaning Blair did not seem to have the clout to be an effective mediator.
The same week in England, there was a 12-point drop in support for the war, according to one opinion poll, with 54% saying that there should be a pause in the bombing. In addition, a speech by Sir Michael Howard, the eminent British historian was widely circulated and discussed. Howard argued that it was "a terrible and irrevocable error” to refer to the current campaign against terrorism as a “war,” rather than a criminal action, since it bestowed unwarranted legitimacy on the terrorists, mythologized them within the Arab and Western world, and created unrealistic expectations for successful military action and victory. Describing the American bombing as “like trying to eradicate cancer cells with a blowtorch,” Howard argued that a “police operation conducted under the auspices of the United Nation” would have been far preferable.[34]
With the Islamic Ramadan religious holidays approaching in mid-November, there was speculation that the U.S. might halt the daily bombing of Afghanistan which was creating increasing casualties and public relations problems with Muslims and others. Ever crude and blunt, Rumsfeld stated “that religion” did not require the cessation of military activities during Ramadan, reminding audiences of Bill Clinton’s contemptuous reference to “that woman.” Condoleeza Rice announced on November 2 that there would be no pause in bombing during the Muslim holy month, a point repeated the next day by President Bush.
Inevitably, comparisons with Vietnam and references to the Afghanistan “quagmire” began to appear in the press. The CIA was blamed by “well-placed sources in Washington” for “total failure” in the south of Afghanistan and Pentagon hawk Richard Perle was alleged to have made critical remarks about the campaign before a TV interview, stating: “I don’t know if it looks to you from the outside like indecisiveness and insanity reigns, but let me tell you, it looks even worse from the inside.”[35] Pakistan’s beleaguered President warned the U.S. that he hoped that the war “was not becoming a quagmire” and pleaded for the bombing to come to a quick end. But obviously the Taliban were digging in for a long fight and endgame was not in sight.
Moreover, Dick Cheney’s comments that there would be “more casualties likely at home than abroad” were not assuring, nor were his comments that the “heightened threat of terrorism might need to be confronted for decades.” Some were disquieted that Cheney was sequestered in an “undisclosed secure location,” out of the public eye. He was rumored to be hiding in a mountain bunker secure from nuclear attack. Indeed, there was a bizarre parallelism of the sinister Cheney hiding out in a cave plotting murder and mayhem in the Middle East so that his friends could have more control of oil supplies, while the sinister bin Laden hid in caves of Afghanistan, plotting terror against Americans. Meanwhile, Cheney’s rightwing Republican allies were plotting in Congress how to steal more federal funds for their wealthy supporters, as I discuss in the next section.
While partisan politics had been suspended for a month or so after the September 11 terrorist activists, Washington was returning to the bitter political divisions that had marked U.S. politics for the past decade. Since the hijacking of the airplanes used in the unprecedented terrorist suicide attack on September 11, there had been intense national concern and federal debate over how best to improve airport security. The ability of four teams of hijackers to get through security with their weapons, fake bombs, and in some cases false identity papers on September 11 raised serious questions concerning airport security in the United States. Obviously, the system had totally failed, much like the system of voting technology in Election 2000, a fatal event that had apparently condemned the world to years of war and destruction of the polity and economy by Team Bush.
There was consensus that something needed to be done to improve airline security, but significant partisan differences over what to do. The Democrats reasonably concluded that the airport security workers who were paid minimum wage and were hired and administered by private companies were poorly trained and the privatized system had dramatically failed. Thus, the Senate, led by the Democratic Party initiative, passed a unanimous 100-0 vote to federalize airport security workers that meant they would be better trained and supervised, and would have longer job tenure and security, hopefully reversing the trend in the privatization of airport security which had led to rapid job turnover and dissatisfaction. One major corporation, Argenbright Security, in charge of airport security in about 40% of U.S. airports, had been cited for hiring criminals, providing mediocre training, and failing to pass minimum security requirements and tests.[36] Yet the Republican-dominated Congress continued to block all Democratic Party proposals for federalized airline security, on the ideological grounds that this would increase Big Government. Despite continued shocking breaches of the airport security system, Congress failed to pass reasonable security measures until November 15, under the pressure of a plane crash in New York City that killed hundreds, as I describe in the next section.
As the global and U.S. economy careened into ever-deepening recession, thousands of jobs were lost weekly, and the economic outlook continued to worsen, there was consensus that something needed to be done, but partisan battles raged in Congress over solutions. Bush immediately rushed through a $15-billion bailout to the airlines (that benefited the corporations and not the workers) and promptly proposed ways that the government would help shoulder insurers’ losses from terrorist attacks. The $90 billion economic stimulus package urged in October by the Bush administration and the Republican-dominated Congress included handouts in tax rebates to major U.S. corporations, including $1.4 billion for IBM, $833 million for General Motors, $671 million for General Electric, $572 million for Chevron Texaco, $254 million for Enron, and millions more for other favored Republican party corporate contributors. There were no provisions in the Republican stimulus package for job retraining or unemployment insurance for those who lost their jobs, no health care provisions, and no plan to get more money into the hands of consumers. Although the Republican package was perceived as war profiteering that would not simulate the economy, Republicans in the House approved the package, on a virtual party-line vote, ending the spirit of bipartisan cooperation in Congress and setting the stage for bitter battles over the economy and budget.
Most disturbing to many, the Bush administration relentlessly pushed rightwing draconian anti-terrorism policies that threatened civil liberties and the open society that had been the pride of the U.S. For years, conservatives had yearned for harsher criminal laws involving wire-tapping, arrest and detention of suspects, restrictions on immigration, and a range of curtailment of civil liberties. The U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft was a longtime hardright advocate of tougher law and order and eagerly pursued the right’s wish list assault on civil liberties. The Bush administration pushed through a compliant Congress a draconian bill that that significantly expands the power of the FBI to spy on wireless telephone calls and the Internet, to circulate the information obtained to other government agencies, and to detain immigrants on the orders of the attorney general, all without court review.
The Bush administration’s new White House Office of Homeland Security established an anti-terrorism agency answerable only to the President, by-passing Congress completely. The Bush administration also instructed the Pentagon to create an office Commander-in-Chief U.S.A. and to involve the military in domestic affairs. There was also talk putting aside a 150-year old statute, known as the Posse Comitatus Act, that keeps the military out of the business of domestic law enforcement, thus paving the way for a further militarization of society. The FBI was also refashioned from an agency to fight crime to a government arm of the war against terrorism, providing instruments of domestic repression and a police state.
On October 31, Attorney General Ashcroft ruled that the government could eavesdrop on phone calls between lawyers and clients if it was deemed there was “reasonable suspicion” to justify such a move. By November, over 1,200 people had been arrested and detained, usually Arabs or Muslims, and mostly without legal representation. When these massive detentions failed to produce any new evidence of the Al Qaeda network or terrorist plots, a discussion began about whether the U.S. should engage in torture to extract knowledge from suspects.
The Bush administration was thus carrying out a Jihad on civil liberties and those who had supported the appointment of the Talibanesque John Ashcroft as head of the Justice Department were complicit in the systematic assault on democracy and constitutional balance of powers. Ashcroft claimed, like the Taliban, that he never read papers or watched television and began the day with group prayers and bible readings with his close associates. The Attorney General reserved for himself and his rightist associates to determine who was a terrorist, whose e-mail, telephone and computer communications could be monitored, who could be arrested without warrant and held without charges, whose conversations with their lawyers could be monitored, and who in effect would lose all civil liberties if suspected of being a terrorist.
On November 14, the U.S. moved closer to a police state when the Bush administration summarily announced that it was going to hold military trials for any foreign terrorists, which would not be subject to the legalities of the U.S. judicial system. This decision, as with Bush’s other draconian curtailing of civil liberties, was not done with consultation with Congress and many feared that a drastic abrogation of the division of powers and further erosion of constitutional democracy was underway. The conservative columnist William Safire wrote in a hard-hitting Op Ed piece “Seizing Dictorial Power” (New York Times, Nov. 15, 2001) that: “Misadvised by a frustrated and panic-striken attorney general, a president of the United States has just assumed what amounts of dictatorial power to jail or execute aliens.” Other critics decried the coming of Star Chambers, Kangaroo Courts, the emergence of a Talibanesque legal system, and Jihad against civil liberties undertaken by the Bush administration.
Ashcroft and the Bush administration were attacking civil liberties, the judicial system, and the open society in other ways as well. When Ashcroft was nominated as Attorney General he promised to apply the law objectively and not follow his well-known rightwing ideological and religious prejudices. But in a stunning use of legal muscle in November 2001 he overturned citizens’ initiatives in California and Oregon, cracking down on medical use of marijuana that had been approved by ballot and on the right of doctors to participate in a terminally ill patient’s suicide, that had been approved in Oregon elections. Moreover, Ashcroft put restrictions on access to the Freedom of Information Act, while Bush signed an executive order inhibiting access to presidential records. Bush had blocked access to his own papers as Governor of Texas, where he had systematically engaged in sleazy deals with friends and contributors, wrecked the economy of the state, undid environmental regulation, and engaged in a record number of capital punishments. Critics suspected that his halting access to presidential papers was not only an expression of his family’s proclivities for secrecy, but protection of the many dubious activities of his father and others in his current administration who had served in previous Reagan-Bush regimes and had been caught up in the Iran-Contra scandals, various covert activities, and domestic corruption. Brazenly sealing presidential papers and other records, Bush was making it clear the open society was a relic of history and Orwellian state secrecy and control of information the order of the day.
One could only yearn for the good old days of the open and free society as the Bush administration relentlessly deconstructed the scaffolding of centuries of carefully constructed constitutional democracy in order to create a dictatorial police state. This state of affairs was almost totally ignored by the TV channels which were increasingly becoming propaganda instruments of the Bush administration, as subservient to the wishes of the Texas Fuhrer as fascist media had been to the dictates of the Third Reich. As it rapidly disappeared, it became clear what a fine liberal, free and open society the U.S. had been. With hysteria over terrorism, however, the deeply anti-democratic rightwing forces who controlled the Bush administration were pushing through legislation inconceivable months before.
In some ways, the Afghan intervention was the Perfect War for the Bush administration. They could push their failing domestic agenda of tax cuts for the rich, increased spending for the military, repressive rightwing law and order policies, and a conservative social agenda. Such policies, unthinkable before September 11, were advanced with the assent of a traumatized country, willing to follow the leader in a time of crisis. Continued terrorist attacks and failures in the battlefield did not seem to harm Bush’s popularity which continued to hover between 85-90% in polls taken in early November. And with the flight of the Taliban in mid-November Bush’s popularity soared to an all-time high, enabling him to push through whatever agenda he pleased - at least for the moment.
The Bush administration had prior to September 11 already planned to push a patriotic agenda in the Fall to identify the Republicans with the flag, patriotism, and nationalism, and Bush and his handlers used the terrorism crisis to push school pledge of allegiance measures and nationalist ideology. In the midst of one of the most frightening crises in U.S. history, it was startling how many visits Bush paid to schools and used photo opportunities to present Bush talking to children. Evidently, Bush’s handlers thought it best to treat the U.S. public as children, to present Bush as Father, and to flood the media with Bush providing simple explanations to children of the national crisis. Moreover, in his few exchanges with the press, Bush himself appeared increasingly childlike, repeating the propaganda line of the day over and over. When asked a complex question, he would wrinkle his brow as if engaged in deep thought and then spit out a simplistic answer like, “we are fighting terrorists. They are evil. We will defeat the evildoers.”
On the whole, Bush had reverted into the Alfred E. Neuman “What me Worry?” mode that had characterized his short but successful political career. His handlers endlessly told the press that Bush continued to get up early, do his daily workout, and get to sleep early. While he had planned to go frequently to his ranch in Texas for R&R, Bush was reportedly pleased with his weekend getaways at Camp David and appeared generally well-rested and relaxed. Some critics, however, made unflattering comparisons between the easy-going Bush and hardworking N.Y. Mayor Rudy Guiliani who continued to labor mightily with N.Y. problems, or British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who endlessly traveled over the world to bolster the U.S.-led coalition, and was starting to appear tired and weary.
Continuing to duel for public opinion, both bin Laden and Bush circulated speeches to their constituents. The bin Laden videotape released on November 3 contained another rambling diatribe against the West, singling out the UN, Pakistan, and other groups that had sided with the West for his threats. The text and video was almost completely ignored by the Western media and one had to go to the BBC website to find the text. A November 9 BBC commentary described the rant as “bin Laden PR blunder,” claiming that bin Laden’s extremist fumings were beginning to embarrass Arabs and Muslims who did not want their grievances to be expressed in such a fashion, or to be associated with terrorism. Many Middle Eastern and Islamic commentators were beginning to criticize bin Laden more sharply and found his attack on the UN as an enemy and its secretary general, Kofi Annan, as a criminal especially offensive.
On the public relations war, the Bush administration was intensifying its efforts. It persuaded the Pakistanis to shut down the daily briefing by the Taliban ambassador whose accusations of crime against the U.S., tirades, and jokes were circulating widely through the Mid-East, providing a Taliban version of the day’s events hours before the U.S. and Britain could respond. Accordingly, propagandists from Britain and the U.S. got together to form a PR offensive that would begin early in the day in London, so that the U.S.-Britain perspective could circulate through the East, and then five hours later Washington would take over the efforts in “public diplomacy.” The Washington team, led by Bush’s (mis) and (dis)information specialist Karen Hughes would also provide segments with U.S. celebrities in consultation with former advertising guru Charlotte Beers, giving rise to speculation that Michael Jordan might be called up to produce spots telling the world to “be like us.” Indeed, Ms. Beers gushed that it would be easy to sell the world attractive brands like George W. Bush and Colin Powell.
There was also a well-publicized meeting in Hollywood on November 11 organized by Karl Rove, Bush’s political advisor who had made a career out of sliming political opponents and getting favors for corporate campaign donors. Rove met with the cinema community to discuss how they could aid in the war against terrorism, providing a power-point presentation to the Hollywood moguls as if they were high school students. The industry leaders, mostly liberal Democrats, grimly posed for a photo op with the ultraright Bush operative Rove who beamed at the lens during his moment of Hollywood glitter.
Rove and Hughes specialized in producing and circulating stories that would slander their opponents and they were concocting a campaign to “demonize” bin Laden, already the most demonized individual in the world. As part of this PR spin offensive, George W. Bush announced in a November 6 speech to Eastern European leaders that bin Laden was trying to get weapons of mass destruction and thus threatened the existence of the entire world. This was well-known news that Bush delivered as if he were pronouncing it for the very first time, and a couple of days later bin Laden played to Bush’s plan to make him a bogeyman by announcing that he already had nuclear weapons and was prepared to use them against the U.S.
Indeed, the daring bin Laden had summoned a Pakistani editor who had written a book on him to disseminate his latest round of messages, which were released on the weekend of November 10-11. In addition to claiming that “We have chemical and nuclear weapons as a deterrent and if America used them against us, we reserve the right to use them,” bin Laden justified the terrorist attacks, claiming that “Muslims have the right to attack America in reprisal.” Although Bin Laden had not yet actually admitted complicity in the September 11 attacks, his interviews and communiques were identifying him with terrorism and Arab leaders were beginning to criticize him, insisting that his views were not those of conventional Islam.
Bush and bin Laden were appearing equally bullying and off-putting to those who were not part of their respective constituencies and propaganda base. Bush’s “your either with us or against us” position was seen as arrogant blustering by much of the world, while bin Laden’s ranting was leading to speculation that the guy had been locked up in a cave too long and was losing it.
The Bush administration planned another prime-time television spectacular for November 8, billing his “reassuring” speech to the nation as his most important in seven weeks. The TV networks, however, failed to go along with the hype with only one network, ABC, playing the speech. Abandoned even by his ever-faithful Fox Republican Network, Bush got very low ratings, getting trounced by Friends, Survivor Africa, and even the World Federation of Wrestling, suggesting, perhaps, that U.S. citizens were eager to return to normal and were becoming tired of Bush’s exploiting the terrorism crisis for his own political benefit. For his part, Bush asked citizens to form local civil defense teams in the war against terrorism, although he offered no specifics and it was not clear that this idea was going to go anywhere.
On the whole, however, the U.S. broadcast media were prime propagandists for the U.S. war against Afghanistan. CNN circulated a memo, leaked to the press, that its news presenters must always present reminders of the terrorist attacks on September 11 when reporting civilian casualties and other U.S. military mishaps. The order really didn’t need to be circulated as CNN was almost completely a propaganda network, as were the other U.S. TV networks. While BBC, Canadian Broadcasting, the world press, the Internet, and other broadcasting institutions highlighted footage of Afghanistan civilian casualties and U.S. military blunders, the American television networks continued focus on the anthrax scare, continuing terror threats, and invocations of the September 11 bombing. ABC President David Westin apologized for a mild statement that he did not have an opinion on whether the Pentagon was a legitimate target, explaining his job was to report the news and not explain it. Dan Rather continued to get teary-eyed as he would close his CBC News report with remembrances of the losses of September 11, and Tom Brokow was surrounded by flags as carried out his daily boostering of the war on the NBC/GE/Military-Industrial Complex network; moreover, NBC now carried a flag logo in its network image on the righthand side of the screen, identifying the network with patriotism and the nation.
But CNN was perhaps the most aggressive in pursuing the propaganda/patriotism sweepstakes during the first months of the infinite U.S. war against terrorism. By November, CNN had developed an introductory news collage of patriotic images that identify the U.S., war, Bush, and CNN in a harmonious unity of patriotism and goodness. The medley of various military and patriotic images is about 30 seconds long, appears after the commercial break before the next cycle of news stories, and is accompanied by loud background military and patriotic music. The collage begins with an image of the destroyed world trade center and the heroic fire fights and policemen working to save their comrades, cuts to an image of Tony Blair and the slogan “A New Spirit” across an American flag. This signals the global unity of the free world against the terrorist crimes and the rebirth of the spirit of crusading and patriot Western militancy out of the tragedy of September 11. In fact, Britain’s Prime Minister is the only major world leader enthusiastically defending the American crusade and the unity and “new spirit” is neither as solid nor as salutory as CNN would like it.
After presenting the U.S. as innocent victims of a violent attack, CNN’s collage next cuts to the evil “enemy” Osama bin Laden, followed by two pictures of American soldiers with the flag as a background and the slogan “Trust” scrolling across the screen. These images set up opposition between good American soldiers and the evil bin Laden with the message to trust in our forces and leaders. The next collage juxtaposes an image of Bush with one of journalists busy producing news with CNN embedded in the background twice and the slogan “Experience” scrolled across the screen. The fast flow of images identifies both “Trust” and “Experience” with CNN and Bush, also signaling how CNN has become a mere propaganda conduit for Bush. Thus, while CNN has “experience” in producing global news, we can no longer trust it to produce anything but military and political propaganda. As for Bush, one can trust him to do and say whatever his handlers tell him and to act on behalf of the perceived interests of the corporate and military interests behind his administration. But in a volatile and complex political situation obviously he does not have the experience to cope with the multiplying problems, thus requiring blind trust and faith in believers that the Bush administration will pull us out of the crisis, rather than making it significantly worse.
The triumphalist opening collage is followed by the graphics “A New War” with the flag as a background cutting to an image of U.S. troops on the group with an airplane taking off and the slogan “global” embedded in the screen. A quick flow of images of a midnight air-strike on Afghanistan, CNN broadcasting the drama, a mourning couple, and demonstrating Islamic people with an American flag splattered over them, concluding with the American flag with the graphics "CNN” and “DEPEND ON” blazoned across the screen. The final images position CNN as the source of news and images of the “new war” with all its drama, tragedy, and excitement, concluding with the equation of CNN and America, wrapped in the advertising slogan “DEPEND ON,” playing off their longtime logo “Depend on CNN.” No more.
Labeled the Clinton News Network during the Ted Turner days because of its supposed liberal slant (not true, it was centrist), CNN had a reputation as the best global network for worldwide news. During the Gulf war CNN had the widest range of views broadcast, including Peter Arnett in Baghdad and a wide range of Arab and other critics of the war. At present, however, playing to a perceived conservative hegemony and replicating war hysteria, it is an almost one-dimensional funnel for the views of the Bush administration and Pentagon. Moreover, it incites domestic hysteria with its all-anthrax-all-the-time coverage, overload of tirades against terrorism, and propagandistic coverage of the war. And while during the Gulf war, CNN footage and reports were used throughout the world to frame the events, in the Afghan war it was Britain’s BBC and ITN and the Arab Al Jazeera that got the scoops and footage that beamed through the global village.
In addition to the propagandistic collage that introduces CNN’s news summaries, the news summaries are now sometimes overladen with the same type of hokey melodramatic music in the background as the UBN and Fox Networks use. Also, CNN follows Fox with a constant stream of graphic headlines at the bottom of the screen, trumpeting each anthrax attack over and over, and generating increased war hysteria and terror. These are clear signs of the tabloidization of CNN which is going for the lowest manipulative denominator of patriotism. Each weekend, CNN loads its schedule with documentaries legitimating the war and the replay of September 11 tragedies with interviews with families who lost members to the crime, as well as documentaries attacking the bin Laden terrorist network.
Part of the reason for the conservative hegemony and propagandistic nature of American television was the pressure put on the television networks by rightwing audiences and those crazed with war hysteria. Reproducing the frenzy that U.S. network coverage was producing, audiences responded with fury whenever criticism of the U.S. military, Bush administration, or U.S. policy was mentioned, and many strenuously objected to any showing of Afghan or other civilian casualties resulting from the U.S.-bombing.
On November 11, there was a protest in Atlanta against CNN’s news coverage, with demonstrators chanting “CNN, half the story, all the time.” The protestors said that millions of Afghans faced starvation because of the bombing but CNN was not reporting the story - nor were the other U.S. television networks. In fact, whereas the CNN President had ordered his minions to mention the enormity of the September 11 tragedy whenever reporting on civilian casualties from the U.S. bombing in Afghanistan, in a November 5 Fox News Network panel discussion, the Fox “Managing Editor and Manager” Brit Hume questioned whether civilian casualties should even be a part of the news, since they are “historically, by definition, a part of war, really.” Hume’s Fox colleagues assented, while Fox anchors and commentators still wore the flag label pins identical to those worn by the Bush administration, as did NBC anchors (ABC ordered its employees not to wear the pins on camera).
British television reports by contrast, as with those of the Canadian Broadcasting Network, had daily coverage of the ups and downs of the war in Afghanistan, including reports critical of the civilian casualties and the dangers of starvation in Afghanistan. BBC reports also had occasional sober reports on the difficulties in rooting out the Taliban and Al Qaeda network, as well as reports on growing British, European, and worldwide opposition to the U.S. bombing strategies. As the U.S. intervention began its second month, the war itself was not going well, although you would not know it from CNN and U.S. television coverage.
On Sunday November 4, one month after the beginning of U.S. bombing of Afghanistan, the leading British newspapers reported that that a major allied offensive was in the works. The Telegraph predicted a “ferocious escalation” of ground war, while the Sunday Times of London headlined “Thousands of troops in big Afghan push ‘within weeks,” claiming that: “British and American forces are about to mount the first significant ground offensive of the war in Afghanistan in an attempt to establish a ‘humanitarian bridgehead’ that would bring winter relief hundreds of thousands of refugees” (Nov. 4, 2001). The story suggested that ground troops in the north would drive the Taliban south to establish an area where refugees could be taken care of. Furthermore, the British Guardian published a story “U.S. flies in arms for rebel onslaught,” claiming that a massive airlift was about to take place “to supply Afghanistan’s rebel forces with arms and ammunition for a major ground offensive against the Taliban,” accompanied by an influx of U.S. advisers to coordinate the operation - a situation that immediately suggested a repeat of U.S. strategy in Vietnam.
Earlier, on November 2, the Washington Post had published a story: “Big Ground Forces Seen as Necessary to Defeat Taliban. Bombing Has Left Missiles Largely Intact.” This report suggested that the U.S. was concluding that the Northern Alliance could not itself undertake a campaign against the Taliban and that U.S. troops would be needed. Interestingly, the Post story highlighted the relatively small scale nature of the U.S. intervention, noting: “The average daily number of combat sorties over Afghanistan is 63, Pentagon officials said. That is just more than one-tenth of the 500 allied sorties flown daily against infrastructure and troops during the 1999 war to expel Serb forces from Kosovo and a tiny fraction of the 1,500 daily missions against Iraqi forces during the Persian Gulf War in 1991.”
Other wire-service reports over the weekend stressed the U.S. saturation-bombing on Taliban positions and that the U.S. was increasing the dropping of supplies to Northern Alliance troops. But a November 4 New York Times story “Afghan Rebels Seem a Reluctant Force so Far” was pessimistic concerning the Northern Alliance, indicating that they refused to train when light rain started and played volleyball while the U.S. bombed the Taliban. Another New York Times article on November 4 focused on “A Vigorous Debate on U.S. War Tactics” and implied that the Bush administration was deeply split over what to do next. And an article “More and More, War is Viewed as America’s” acknowledged that world public opinion was turning against U.S. policy, after initial sympathy, and that the Bush administration was planning a flurry of presidential appearances and speeches the coming week to try to re-persuade the public that its policies were correct.
One curious twist over the weekend was that some commentators and members of the Bush administration and Pentagon no longer referred to the group they were supporting in north Afghanistan as the “Northern Alliance,” but as the “opposition,” “anti-Taliban rebel forces,” and “United Front.” This linguistic switch was perhaps to provide more activist and inclusive designation for the northern-based forces that had been the initial repository of U.S. hopes, but had responded with carping criticism of U.S. policy and seeming lack of the will or ability to fight. The Bush administration had its propaganda force geared up so linguistic creativity was doubtless going to be on the upswing, although the term “Northern Alliance” was soon returned to currency as its allies began finally winning victories in the days ahead.
On Monday November 5, 2001, it was reported that American gunship helicopters attacked Taliban military positions near Kabul, while U.S. warplanes including B-52 bombers blasted a variety of targets in Afghanistan. This was the first time it was alleged that helicopter gunships were used in the campaign and might be signaling a more aggressive role for the U.S. Likewise, the use of 15,000 pound “daisy cutter” bombs suggested augmented U.S. military involvement, as huge bombs were reported exploding over Taliban positions.
A revealing article in the Los Angles Times the same day interviewed Afghanistan refugees in Pakistan and concluded that “With the rising civilian deaths, a nation once regarded as a savior is increasingly being seen as the enemy - and the Taliban as a victim” (Nov. 5, 2001: A3). The article by Alissa J. Rubin collected a series of quotations from war refugees who claimed that they had previously been anti-Taliban and pro-U.S., but that the month of sustained U.S. bombing had made them anti-American and created sympathy for the Taliban. A similar article appeared in the Washington Post a few days later by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, “Support Deepens for the Taliban, Refugees Report. U.S. Errors Fuel Sympathy” (Nov. 8: 01). Obviously, the hearts and minds of the Afghan people were not being won by the bombing campaign and despite increased U.S. propaganda, the anti-Taliban forces would have to soon begin winning victories to avoid a debacle. A November 8 story, “Taliban suicide squads primed for action,” suggested that Islamic fanatics were willing to engage in suicide missions against U.S. or Northern Alliance forces, a disquieting prospect in the light of other suicide attacks against the U.S. which seemed to be the mark of Al Qaeda (The Guardian, Nov. 8, 2001).
On November 9, AP wire services announced that Northern Alliance troops were declaring that they had captured Mazar-i-Sharif, a key site on the road from Uzbekistan and Tajikistan to Kabul that the Northern Alliance had struggled for weeks to take against allegedly fierce Taliban resistance. Perhaps the increased U.S. bombing in the area and Special Forces on the ground were beginning to take a toll on the Taliban, who reportedly fled from the city as the Northern Alliance troops entered. Or perhaps the Taliban could have easily been dislodged from this region where they had no popular support much earlier if the U.S. had properly supported Northern Alliance troops in the area.
In any case, U.S. officials cautiously proclaimed that if the city of Masar-i-Sharif had indeed fallen to the opposition, it could serve as a “land bridge” providing supply routes to the North and a staging base for assaults on Kabul and South Afghanistan. But for the first time, it was reported that splits were emerging in the UK-U.S. alliance (The Guardian, Nov. 9, 2001). British ministers expressed frustration concerning the U.S. bombing strategy, the lack of consultation with allies, insufficient U.S. focus on the humanitarian crisis, and the failure of the U.S. to seriously address the Israeli-Palestine conflict. Although the British had been promised that Colin Powell would make a long-promised speech at the UN calling for a Palestinian state and taking a tough line on Israel, this was cancelled, even though the Israelis had recently insulted the U.S. by using the analogy of appeasement to the Nazis in response to U.S. pressures to reach a settlement with the Palestinians and to halt violence against them.
U.S. news reports over the weekend of November 10-11 were largely triumphalist, celebrating the capture by the Northern Alliance of Mazar-i-Sharif and five Northern provinces, giving the anti-Taliban forces control of about one-third of Afghanistan and ready to march on Kabul. Alarmed that their entry into Kabul would cause chaos before a multiforce-governing body was formed, the Bush administration urged the Northern Alliance troops to declare Kabul a free city but not to enter it. There were also warnings that the West should not trust the Northern Alliance which had killed thousands, and raped and plundered the last time it had captured Mazar-i-Sharif, while the Pakistanis also obviously did not want the Northern Alliance to gain too much power in Afghanistan.[37]
Whereas most of the newspapers, wire service, and TV reports on November 11 had the Northern Alliance routing the Taliban whose forces were allegedly fleeing Mazar-i-Sharif and other Northern provinces and being taken prisoner or killed, there was a report in the Los Angeles Times that about 1,000 Taliban and their Islamic Arab supporters were refusing to surrender in Mazar-i-Sharif, had taken hostages, and were engaged in a bloody battle for control of the city.[38] By November 12, however, the Northern Alliance were claiming that they had captured the northeastern city of Taliqan, were moving toward Herat, now controlled the northern half of the country and were ready to move into the capital city of Kabul.
It appeared for the first time that the U.S.-allied forces in Afghanistan were seizing ground and initiative and that it might be possible to establish U.S. bases in northern Afghanistan, to enable transportation and distribution of humanitarian supplies, and to establish a territory to go after the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Whereas for the previous five weeks the Northern Alliance had severely criticized U.S.-bombing strategies, as noted above, now they were praising its precision and effectiveness. Perhaps, as many had suggested, it required U.S. troops on the ground to liaison with the Northern Alliance, provide on-site intelligence, and coordinate bombing with troop movements. It remained to be seen, of course, whether an intelligent military and political campaign would evolve and whether U.S. power would be used effectively, or whether the Bush administration and Pentagon would fail to successfully deploy their awesome power, dislodge the Taliban, and capture Al Qaeda without throwing the country and region into chaos.[39]
A New York Times story “Savoring Strength in the North, U.S. Worries about Weakness in the South” (Nov. 12, 2001) signaled precisely the problem now facing the U.S. military. While the Northern Alliance controlled the part of the country where their tribal alliances were dominant, the Taliban was rooted in the tribal culture of the South, and seemed to have strong support. There also continued to be disturbing stories about civilian casualties, including claims that the U.S. had bombed caves housing civilians, killing hundreds, and had destroyed a Muslim shrine in a small village, far from the main cities. It was not possible to know at the moment if these were desperate Taliban propaganda stories, or if the U.S. was continuing to bomb civilian targets that would erode support for its efforts.
The weekend of November 10-11 seemed to mark the continuing advance of Northern Alliance troops and the beginning of the end for the Taliban as a governing force. To the surprise of many, it appeared that the Taliban were surrendering power much more easily than anyone had anticipated. Rather than defending Kabul, the capital city, the Taliban fled, leaving a power vacuum. Although the Bush administration told the Northern Alliance not to enter the city of Kabul, they triumphantly entered over the weekend, on the grounds that chaos and looting required their troops to maintain order. Actually, in a cute media spin, it was BBC reporter John Simpson who “liberated” Kabul marching into the city with his crew and picking up young street urchins to accompany him on his triumphant march to the capital.[40] Although the Taliban had apparently abandoned the city, the U.S. sent in a cruise missile that hit the al Jeezera broadcasting studio. During the same attack, an explosion blasted through the wall of the BBC studio, reproduced in oft-played broadcast pictures. Soon after, Al Jeezera claimed that the U.S. deliberately targeted its studio, that was seen by many as a mouthpiece for the Taliban and anti-American propaganda.[41]
Britain’s BBC and ITN footage of Kabul after the collapse of the Taliban was quite stunning, portraying not only the joy of liberation and freedom to play music and cut beards after Taliban prohibition, but also of atrocities and the devastation of war. U.S. television, by contrast, largely played triumphalist imagery and the Brits seemed to have scooped the Americans completely on the story; ABC was largely rebroadcasting BBC footage and the other U.S. networks were mostly Bush administration and Pentagon propaganda conduits, with no original footage or reporting. A New York Times article by Caryn James (Nov. x, 2001) noted that hundreds of thousands of U.S. viewers were turning to the British BBC and ITN broadcasts to get hard news on the progress of the war and how it was seen by other parts of the world.[42] The U.S. TV networks had lost their legitimacy among serious viewers and could no longer be watched for accurate and wide-ranging news and information. In a Newsworld conference in Barcelona, the director of Canada’s CBC News said “it’s depressing to see the jingoism” in American TV news, and that watching U.S. news and European network coverage was like watching “two different wars.” An ITN official complained that constant replay of the deaths and horror of the World Trade Center attacks was “pornographic” (Guardian, Nov. 14, 2001).
After escaping from Kabul and northern Afghanistan, there were reports that the Taliban were fleeing from the south to Pakistan, that local southern troops were arresting or chasing Taliban away, and in some cases killing them, and that the Taliban “spiritual center” of Kandahar was under siege from Northern Alliance troops, and southern forces rebelling against the Taliban. Oppositional forces claimed that they had taken the airport in Kandahar and that the city was in chaos. It was also reported that the Taliban (or Northern Alliance troops) had looted all international aid and food agencies in Mazar-i-Sharif, and that the hundreds of young Pakistani volunteers who had been abandoned by the Taliban and were supposed to fight the Northern Alliance were massacred. There were indeed pictures coming out of Afghanistan of victorious rebel troops killing the Taliban and their Arab supporters. The BBC was full of video of Northern Alliance forces killing Pakistani and other Taliban volunteers, stealing their wallets, and holding up their identity cards to gleefully proclaim that they were “foreigners” and deserved to be killed. Taliban supporters were also being arrested in Kabul and other cities and the BBC and ITN broadcast video showing their arrest, detention in prisons that looked like animal cages, and in some cases their deaths. Hundreds were killed in the fighting of the past few days, and revenge, looting, and chaos were spreading throughout the country.
The U.S. released statements that bin Laden and Al Qaeda and Taliban leadership “were on the move” and that U.S. intelligence was targeting them. To the surprise of some, it appeared that Taliban support in the south was also rapidly eroding, with southern tribal groups and militia turning on the Taliban, and changing sides, a practice described as a longtime Afghan tradition. The question of the moment, however, seemed to be whether political order and stability could be imposed on the rapidly evolving political situation in Afghanistan and what would be the Al Qaeda response to the routing of the Taliban.
On Monday, November 11, Veteran’s Day was being celebrated in the United States while reports came in from Afghanistan that the Northern Alliance had just taken the key western city of Herat and now controlled over half of the country with the Taliban in retreat and flight throughout the country. Yet news from New York overshadowed the Afghanistan story. Early morning reports announced that “American Airline jet crashes in New York” and “Homes in Queens on Fire.” Minutes after taking off from Kennedy Airport on Long Island, American Airlines 587 crashed in the Rockways section of Queens, a New York working-class borough where many fire-fighters and police who died in the World Trade Center attack lived. Witnesses reported seeing an explosion in the air, whereas others saw one of the engines slipping off, giving rise to speculation as to whether a terrorist bombing or sabotage had caused the crash, although it was not immediately known what the cause had been, giving rise to proliferating speculation.
America was living in constant fear. Once again it was all-terror-all-the-time on the television networks. 255 passengers and crew on the plane were dead, 44 fire-trucks and 200 firemen were sent to Queens where houses were burning and the rituals of terror were being repeated once again: unending television coverage of the tragedy site, interviews with eyewitnesses, press conferences with Rudy Giuliani, statements from the White House, initially that they had no information on the crash and then that they believed it was not terrorist-related, and wall-to-wall television coverage.
There were two other major stories in the news on December 11 concerning the dramatic twists of the Afghan war and the results of a consortium inspection of the thousands of votes never counted in the 2000 Election. Yet in the new era of “Breaking News,” the U.S. cable channels continuously played the NY plane disaster, ignoring everything else. Using on the scene reporting, “expert testimony,” and government interviews, the story took over the days’ news, spreading fear that once again terror had struck and showing how New York was hit by yet another tragedy.
“Breaking News” TV has become a form of reality television in which TV capitalizes on the “you are there” dimension of television as a window into unfolding events, and endlessly repeats the key dramatic footage of the spectacle, while breathlessly presenting new bulletins as important developments to keep the audience hooked on the story. Breaking News television assembles its “experts” who circulate the same-old same-old stale opinions. Some of the “experts” are government spinners who circulate whatever “opinion” the spin-doctors at the White House are concocting and for reasons not completely clear the Bush administration was relentlessly spinning the line that the cause of the crash was mechanical, that it was not related to terrorism, a conclusion that seemed rather hasty given that the plane had not even been inspected and that sabotage was certainly a distinct possibility.
Hence, the Bush administration throughout the day downplayed the possibility of terrorism and officials leaked that “mechanical failure” was the source, but every hypothesis was quickly shot down and suspicions mounted that there could have been sabotage. In fact, the possibility of a catastrophic mechanical failure and/or terrorist sabotage were equally disquieting and there was speculation that American Airlines, the biggest national air corporation and a major Bush administration supporter, might go bankrupt - or be bailed out once again by its friends in government, who seemed eager to bail out its big corporate supporters, but was reluctant to provide increased health or welfare benefits from workers out of a job.
Just when there was progress for the first time in the Afghan war, the world was once again shown the horrible consequences of a life in terror in which the technologies of everyday life can be “repurposed,” sabotaged, or simply fail, causing massive tragedy. The terror war was giving Americans lessons in the fragility and contingency of life and what it felt like to be confronted with the possibility of instant and violent, death at any moment. It was a harsh lesson and America had lost its innocence, although it was not yet clear what the American people would learn from the national traumas, nor how long the national trials and tribulations would go on and under what form.
It was arguably a perfect time to halt the bombing in Afghanistan, to call for a peace campaign, and to discover new ways to fight the international menace of terrorism - although no major politician or pundit made this suggestion in the war-crazed and terror hysteria saturated country. But consider: the U.S.-backed Northern Alliance had just won an impressive string of military victories in their home-based north of Afghanistan and the Taliban seemed to be collapsing in the south. Yet world public opinion had been turning against the U.S. bombing campaign, and with the month of Ramidan continued Afghan casualties could turn many in the Muslim world against America forever and breed fertile ground for new terrorists. Moreover, influential voices in the Arab world were beginning to be sharply critical of bin Laden and Al Qaeda, and it would be relatively easy to isolate them, expose them to the harsh scrutiny of world public opinion, leading to eventual arrest and shutdown.
Furthermore, there were rising concerns over the humanitarian problem in Afghanistan with over six million refugees poised to starve, hunger and sickness throughout the refugee and civilian population of Afghanistan, and the impossibility of aid agencies to come to Afghanistan during the bombing and political chaos. While Northern Alliance control of the north of the country could make it possible to house and feed part of the country, there was still the question of the ultimate fate of the Taliban, Bin Laden, and Al Qaeda who were rumored to be prepared for guerrilla war in the mountains. There was also the question of politically stabilizing an obviously chaotic political situation and no one could guess how many innocents would be the victim of continued fighting. Reports circulated that millions of Afghans were continuing to flee, some from the north fearing Northern Alliance retaliation, some to the north seeking refuge from the Taliban, and some not knowing where to flee. There were also reports from the UN of executions in Masur-I-Shariff, and killing, looting and general chaos throughout the country and many feared civil war.
It was therefore an arguably appropriate time to call for a truce and declare a cease-fire as Ramidan was approaching, and to begin a long and difficult period of reconciliation between the U.S. and Muslim/Arab world. A general amnesty could be promised to all of the Taliban who surrender, lay down their arms, agree to a reconciliation and unity government, and pledge to help seek and root out Al Qaeda. In fact, it had been generally overlooked in the terror and war frenzy that respected UN Secretary Mary Robinson had released a report on Taliban war crimes just as the U.S. was starting its military operations. The report documented Taliban mass killings of civilian villagers and other war crimes, such as were committed in Bosnia, thus establishing the basis for an international tribunal for Taliban leaders responsible for these crimes and for supporting the terrorist crimes of Al Qaeda (Newsday, Oct. 12, 2001).
The UN report could be the basis of criminalization for those in the Taliban culpable of crimes against humanity. Moreover, in his various videotapes and interviews since September 11, bin Laden had all but admitted responsibility for the terrorist attacks, and there was a report circulating in mid-November that Britain had gotten hold of a recent bin Laden communique to Al Qaeda that confessed his responsibility for the September 11 acts and that called for more such acts. Indeed, on November 13 the British government released new documents on the government website indicating bin Laden’s confession of guilt in the September 11 terrorist acts, including a video that showed him gloating over the crimes, saying that “it is what we instigated for a while, in self-defence. If avenging the killing of our people is terrorism, let history be a witness that we are terrorists.”
On this basis of evidence of Taliban and Al Qaeda crimes, it would be simple to criminalize bin Laden and Al Qaeda, to demand their surrender, and to send in UN-guided troops and perhaps Special Forces from around the world to get them if they refused to surrender. Such actions would give significant legitimacy to an international campaign against terrorism and could provide the basis for a reconciliation of the U.S. and the Islamic world, as well as to strike a significant blow against global terrorism and move to stabilize the political situation in Afghanistan. Terrorism was obviously a global problem and required a global solution. As long as the U.S. continued its military intervention, however, it was clear that Islamic terrorism would continue to gain recruits and carry out daring and lethal attacks against the U.S. and its citizens anywhere, anytime. In a continued terror war, all would live in fear and there would be no peace or security in the West or in the Islamic world.
There could, in fact, be no total military victory against terrorism, and although the Taliban, bin Laden, and Al Qaeda might be defeated, the dangers were that new networks would grow out of the ashes of the old. Cycles of violence and retribution seemed to perpetuate themselves and the hoary metaphor of the Hydra, in which ten new heads are born of the wounded body of the mythical monster, warned that terrorism could not be eliminated by the crushing of one group. The rightwing militarists, of course, made this same argument, which they used to urge on the continuation of the Holy Jihad to Iraq, Syria, or wherever else terrorists might be held. The issue therefore was whether a solely U.S.-led military campaign could cripple global terrorism, or whether this feat would require a multilateral and multidimensional global campaign.
There were also questions as to whether the U.S. could afford to bear the expenses of waging war forever. Costs were now estimated at $1 billion per month for continuation of the Afghan war. By contrast, the bombing campaign in Yugoslavia had cost $3 billion, while the Gulf war bore a price tag of over $61 billion in military expenses, with U.S. allies footing most of the bill and with some estimates that the U.S. had earned a profit. In a situation of worldwide recession, it was unlikely that there could be much sharing of these costs and it was not clear how long the U.S. could sustain such expenses itself.[43]
There was no evidence that the Bush administration was contemplating any ceasing of its military activities. The Pentagon was giddy with the success of their bombing campaign and Dick Cheney briefly emerged from his hide-out to gloat over the route of the Taliban and to attack all of those who had criticized his military adventure. Earlier in the week, Cheney's wife and other rightists who claimed the be “the Defense of Civilization Fund” had circulated a chilling bulletin, attacking University professors and protestors who had spoken out against the Cheney-Bush-Rumsfeld military campaign.[44] The same week, the Bush administration had declared that foreign terrorists would be tried by military tribunal and continued to pass the sort of ultra-hardright law and order conservativism beloved by Cheney and his cabal. Democracy was as clearly under siege in the U.S. as survival was at stake for the Afghans.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch in Crawford, Texas, George W. Bush entertained his soulmate Vladimir Putin, the President of Russia, taking him on a pick-up truck tour of his ranchette and treating him to a Texas barbecue. Putin had reportedly taken horseback riding lessons so that he could traverse Texas-style with Bush, but it turns out that the Andover president is no Reagan when it comes to the equestrian arts. Reportedly, the two world leaders had agreed not to discuss touchy issues like the U.S. desire to throw aside all nuclear test ban treaty and go gungho for its Star Wars missile “defense” system. Putin must have been tempted, however, by a new series of reports that suggested that Star Wars II couldn’t work, was prohibitively expensive, and would lead to the militarization of space and new dangers in the future of getting zapped by space satellite. The Pentagon Masters of War relentlessly pushed their folly and the compliant Bush went along with the fantasy and Putin zipped his mouth, at least in public.[45]
The meeting between the president of the United States and Russia during a crucial phase of the Afghan war was truly a marvelous surreal spectacle of dialectical reversal. Ten years earlier the U.S. and Soviet Union had been involved in the last great battle of the Cold War in Afghanistan. After Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski had begun a covert project in 1978 to arm Islam mujedeen to overthrow a leftist government in Afghanistan friendly to the Soviet Union, the Russians responded with a military invasion of their own and establishing a friendly government, after the previous Afghan regime was overthrown in 1979. A mere twenty years ago, in 1981, George Bush senior, former head of the CIA and then Reagan’s Vice-President, was conspiring with William Casey and the CIA to train Islamic radicals to fight the Soviets, providing them with billions of dollars of aid, up-to-date Stinger missiles, tanks, rockets, and weapons to fight the Russians. Bush senior and the CIA were indeed establishing training camps to make the “freedom fighters” more effective Jihad Warriors against the Soviets. Bush/CIA allies in this project were of course Osama bin Laden and the Islamic radicals who formed Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and the other terrorist networks now set on destroying the U.S.
Moreover, over the past decades the Bush family had long been in business with their good friends the Bin Ladens. Bush senior had been friendly with various Bin Ladens over the years, although eye-brows were raised when Bin Laden’s oldest brother, said to be close to Bush senior, died in a plane crash in Texas never explained. The Bin Laden family had reportedly invested in Junior’s failed Arbusto oil company and the Bin Ladens continued until recently to be close business associates of the Bush-Baker syndicate. Bush, Baker, the Bin Ladens, and other highly placed government and business executives were major investors in the Caryle Group, one of the biggest holders of defense industry stocks, an area that promised to mushroom in profits from the Terror War that their respective sons were in charge of.
Such a story could hardly be imagined by the world’s greatest writers but there you have it. Putin and Bush, a short while ago on opposites sides of the Afghan war, having a friendly barbecue in Texas. Meanwhile, Bin Laden and the Al Qaeda, having been trained, financed, and armed by Bush Senior’s CIA, were being chased and bombed by the very forces that had originally helped set them up. And to make it personal, Osama, the blacksheep of the Bin Laden family was being pursued by George W. Bush, the one-time blacksheep favored son of the family who his clan had been in business with and pursued complex and shadowy relationships for decades. In fact, a former FBI official leaked a memo claiming that the FBI had been given instructions to halt investigations into connections between the Bin Laden family and Al Qaeda when Bush Junior took over as President in January 2001, after his successful election theft. The FBI had been warned hands off of the Bin Ladens, no doubt because they were such close business allies of the Bush syndicate, as well as alleged funders of Al Qaeda and their wayward son’s activities.
Thus the Evil One was in fact part of a family close to the Bushs, and it turns out that the Us/Them dichotomy that the Bush administration had been perpetually is more complicated that one-dimensional patriots would have it. In fact, They are Us, We are Them, and the Bushes and bin Laden’s have long been partners in crime before becoming bitter rivals (remember J.R. and Cliff, the Ewings and Barnes on the TV-series Dallas. Yup, folks, the Terror War is the same story writ large of feuding and overlapping families).
In fact, it is rarely acknowledged that earlier Bush intrafamily squabbles had also exploded into public during Bush Senior’s reign, in the forms of the Panama invasion and Gulf War. In these events, Bush senior turned with fury on two men that he had been associated with during his CIA/Reagan/Bush administration years. Many believed that Noreiga of Panama was a longtime CIA asset and there were many reports of meetings over the years between Bush and Noriega. It was widely believed that Noriega was working with Bush and a covert team in the Reagan administration to illegally supply weapons to the Nicaruagan contras after Congress had banned U.S. support; allegedly, Noriega was embarrassingly involved in the drug business and was using a contra support network to move drugs and launder money and these, or other unspecified, reasons led Bush to turn on his one-time ally in the 1989 Panama Invasion (on Bush and Noriega, see xx).
Bush senior was also point-man for Saddam Hussein during the Reagan era, helping him get intelligence and arms for his war against Iran in the 1980s; Bush allegedly approved billions of loans for Saddam that enabled him to build up his military and weapons program and then turned on his former ally after Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, leading to the Gulf war (see Kellner 1992). Such are the things that great novels, films, and documentaries are made of, but our supine, ignorant, and cowardly historians, whores of the culture industry, and writers fail to take on the challenge of the amazing tales of the Bush clan. Hopefully, sooner or later, the world will get wise to the now clearly confirmed fact that Bush presidencies bring on war and economic devastation. The record is clear, my friends, and the Bush gang will continue to rob the federal treasuries for their friends, allies, and funders; wage fierce Jihad against what is left of American democracy; and will try to control and dominate what is left of the world economy. Until they are exposed and dealt with, there will continue to be war, terrorism, upheaval, and the erection of a military-police state with the hardcore right firmly in chargeŠ
But I digress. To return to our story: As Bush Junior and his buddy Putin partied in Texas, Washington was not overly triumphalist despite the astonishing collapse of the Taliban. UPI announced on November 14 that Cheney continued to change his “secret, undisclosed” residency “because the United States fears a decapitation attack by terrorists armed with weapons of mass destruction.” The Times of London reported that Bin Laden’s nuclear secrets had been found in an Al Qaeda headquarters in Kabul that had been abandoned (Nov. 15, 2001). The safe house contained partly burnt documents that “give detailed designs for missiles, bombs and nuclear weapons,” giving credence to Bin Laden’s boast that Al Qaeda possessed nuclear weapons that would be used in self-defense; as the Taliban collapsed the moment of truth might be nearing, or the nuclear threat might be hot air.[46]
To add to the terror equation, Mullah Omar told BBC new (which was getting all the scoops) that the Taliban would fight to the end and “choose death” rather than surrender. He promised to counterattack soon and that his forces have “a big plan” for the destruction of America, boasts echoed by Bin Laden (This London, Nov. 14, 2001). Another underground Al Qaeda laboratory was uncovered on November 15 that seemed to contain foul-smelling materials which could have been a chemical weapons factory.
Yet the Pentagon was in the victory mode on November 15 and circulated pictures of U.S. Special Forces troops riding on horseback with the Northern Alliance pursuing the Taliban. The genuinely loony Rumsfeld grinned his crazed smile from ear to ear as he showed reporters a photograph of a donkey used by the Northern Alliance to transport food and ammunition and described signing orders for saddles, bridles and horse feed. The combination of high-tech and premodern war was indeed surreal and the movie might be entertaining if we knew the conclusion.
Unfortunately, the U.S. was also forced to admit that it had bombed a mosque in the eastern town of Khost on the first day of Ramadan, although it denied a report that stray bombs had killed 62 civilians in the village. The British Independent reported that U.S. “Carpet bombing ‘kills 150 civilians’ in frontline town” (Nov. 19, 2001), and BBC screened families complaining of being bombed in their village by the U.S. after they had evicted the Taliban. Such stories did not appear on U.S. television, or even in the press. U.S. audiences went ballistic everytime there were reports of civilian casualties or any criticism of the U.S. military or Bush administration, showering the offending party with indignant e-mail, telephone calls, letters, and threats to boycott. The networks went along with the popular mood and provided a highly sanitized and idealized view of the Afghan war, forcing audiences who wanted to really know what was happening to turn to British or Canadian TV, widely available in U.S. cable and satellite systems, or to the foreign press, easily accessible on the Internet to those literate in information literacy.
The weekend of November 16-17 was opened by contradictory reports. The big story of the previous day had been that Mohammed Atef, Bin Laden’s righthand man, military guru, and heir apparent had been killed in a U.S. bombing of a building in Kabul and subsequent fleeing Taliban. It was also reported that Mullah Omar, head of the hardcore Taliban, had cut a deal and was going to depart Kandahar in exchange for his safe passage. Yet on Saturday morning, Reuters claimed “Taliban Denies Report of Kandahar Pullout,” and reported that heavy fighting was going on in the city and in Kunduz, the two remaining Taliban strongholds (Nov. 17, 2001), a contradictory situation that remained through the weekend.
The political situation on the ground in Afghanistan was also extremely confusing. On November 15, British troops arrived unannounced in the Russian-built Bagram airbase in north Afghanistan. But no one had apparently informed the Northern Alliance who immediately proclaimed that foreign troops were not needed to maintain order and should leave at once, leading British newspaper to nervously tut-tut about the fate of its troops, and Britain to delay sending more troops. The Northern Alliance were assuming functions of a new administration throughout the northern half of the country to the alarm of many in the West (and Pakistan). But there were also reports that various Afghan war lords were seizing power and it was not clear that there was a coherent plan in place to stop the alleged revenge killing, power struggles, looting, and chaos throughout the country, that Western reporters, who now had access to the country, were describing the disturbing situation in sometimes grisly detail.
There were conflicting rumors on November 16 as to whether Bin Laden had left Afghanistan, though the Pentagon believed he had not and continued heavily bombing the remaining Taliban positions and continuing the hunt for Al Qaeda leaders. Laura Bush, not previously known for her feminism, gave her first national radio address in which she “fired the first salvo in what she called ‘a worldwide effort to focus on the brutality against women and children’ by the Taliban and the terrorists believed to be operating from Afghanistan's remote areas” (www.cnn.com, Nov. 16, 2001). And it was leaked that the National Security Agency was going to launch a campaign to “keep it zipped,” based on the World War II message that “loose lips might sink ships.” U.S. citizens were told to be careful of giving terrorists any information that would help them plan their attacks. Already the U.S. government had taken reams of information off of its government websites and now citizens were supposed to do the same. The information society was evidently temporarily way-laid as Enduring War relentlessly forged a new military-police state.
Pundits and arm-chair generals were ferociously debating the military strategy deployed and attacking those who had gone wobbly and worried about “quagmire,” conclusions somewhat premature as the war on terrorism had hardly been won, and the Pentagon and Bush administration were indeed saying over and over that the war had just begun. CIA apologist Bob Woodward wrote in the Washington Post that “Secret CIA Units [were] Playing a Central Role” (Nov. 18, 2001). Woodward’s sources had leaked to him that CIA secret paramilitary units had been in Afghanistan since the beginning and with Predator surveillance unmanned drones in the sky were providing key intelligence for the U.S. airstrikes. No doubt soon afterwards, someone from the U.S. Special Forces would float a story that it was their guys who were the real heros. And top level Air Force officials informed Thomas E. Ricks in the Washington Post that “Target Approval Delays Irk Air Force officials” (Nov. 18, 2001), claiming that at least ten times, they had top Taliban and Al Qaeda officials in their cross-hairs, but U.S. Central Command had held up approval, slowing down progress in the war.
Washington Post editorialists had been particularly blood-thirsty during the entire war, calling for intensified bombing, ground troops, and expanding the war to get states supporting terrorism, like Iraq. Writers for the neo-liberal New Republic had also been militarist and hawkish. Its editor Peter Beinart had persistently attacked critics of the war and even as the routing of the Taliban was underway, the New Republic editors called for U.S. ground troops (“Hit the Ground,” Nov. 8, 2001).
While the U.S. press played out military quarrels in the media, the British press provided in-depth looks at the vicissitudes of the military campaign. A long two-part analysis in the Guardian, “The Rout of the Taliban” (Nov. 18, 2001), claimed that there had been a fierce debate within allied U.S. and British military circles whether they should go for a fast campaign, using heavy bombing, U.S. ground forces, and Northern Alliance forces, or a slower, more systematic bombing campaign that would then draw upon Northern Alliance, and if necessary, U.S. ground forces. Obviously, the latter strategy had been decided upon, and when Northern Alliance forces were apparently sufficient to rout the Taliban, U.S. ground forces were deemed not necessary.
A story by Cole Moreton in the Independent, “The bloody road to Kandahar” (Nov. 18, 2001), documented the heavy fighting between Taliban and Northern Alliance forces, and the incredibly bloody aftermath with thousands of revenge killings, both downplayed in the U.S. press. Although Pentagon officials had noted that they were systematically attacking Taliban troops who were fleeing the cities they had abandoned, there were no estimates of how many had been killed and few press reports on the topic. There were also questions concerning how many U.S. troops had been killed. UPI released a bulletin on November 18 that an anonymous Bush administration source estimated that between 25-40 U.S. Special Forces troops had been killed in heavy fighting on the ground. The report also indicates that the Pentagon had forged a new policy of not announcing U.S. causality figures. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had announced earlier that "This is the last time I’m telling you the truth" and apparently he meant it. At one press conference, after admitting that U.S. forces were in involved in ground operations, Rumsfeld said that none had been killed, a remark a State Department official deemed "crazy."
It appears that the U.S. had been impressed with Britain’s policy of not announcing casualties in Special Operations forces and the U.S. seemed to be following suit. The Pentagon also appeared to be following standard Bush administration policy of systematic lying and sacrificing truth to the political exigencies of the moment. Conservatives had once valued truth as a high value, but for Bushspeak the end was to manipulate the public and promote the Bush agenda and anything said or done which promoted the agenda was justified. Evidently, the Pentagon, never an agent for truth, was pursuing Bushspeak for its own agenda and lies and evasion were piling up as high as dead bodies in Afghanistan (for a systematic examination of Bushspeak, see Kellner, 2001, Chapter x).
Political chaos in Afghanistan was so striking that even the U.S. media were forced to deal with it. It appeared that the old Afghan War Lords had returned to power and that civil war between the competing power blocs and ethnic divisions was likely. As oppositional troops fought the Taliban and their Arab allies in their remaining strongholds of Kandahar and Kunduz, War Lords seized power in their old fiefdoms, spheres of influence were divided up, and often armed rival groupings faced each other with the outcome in play.
But in southern Afghanistan, there was a human tragedy that British and U.S. media were presenting entirely differently. Fleeing from the heavy fighting in Kandahar, the last major stronghold of the Taliban, which also had as many as 10,000 foreign fighters who were refusing to surrender, as many as 100,000 Afghans were refugees in the sand-swept desert, many without tents, food, or shelter of any sort. British media presented the camp as refugees from U.S. bombing who said fear of the daily bombing attacks had driven them out of the city. U.S. media presented the camps as refuges from Taliban oppression and the dangers of civil war. Curiously, ABC news used BBC footage of the camp but the voice over by the BBC correspondent was totally different, with a pronounced emphasis on refugees resulting from U.S. bombing in the BBC report and while presenting the people in the desert as refugees from the Taliban and dangers of civil war in the ABC report. Probably, there were many reasons for the refugees to flee to the camps, but it was symptomatic of U.S. television reports that it was now forbidden to say anything critical of the U.S. military campaign and to allege that U.S. bombing was causing civilian casualties in Afghanistan, leading to a disconnect between U.S. television and world media representations in press and television.[47]
Meanwhile, media attention focused on the fate of bin Laden, Al Qaeda, and the rapidly dwindling Taliban leadership linked to it. The Times of London had reported on November 17 that the Taliban was in total collapse after Mullah Omar agreed to surrender Kandahar, its last powerbase. Evidently, this had been impossible as fanatic Taliban components and their Arab allies, linked to Al Qaeda, refused to surrender and were reportedly killing Taliban who were surrendering. In addition, the British Independent reported that “Taliban abandon surrender plan after ‘prophetic dream’” (Nov. 20, 2001). Evidently, Mullah Omar, the one-eyed former commander and head of the Taliban, had “a dream in which I am in charge for as long as I live,” and thus told Northern Alliance contacts, who passed on the story to the press, that he had decided not to surrender, but to fight on.
The Times reported on November 19 that “Taleban abandon bin Laden,” claiming that the Taliban leadership had declared that bin Laden no longer enjoyed their protection and there were stories that Taliban and others were joining the U.S. and British in searching for bin Laden who reportedly was fleeing from cave to cave. Indeed, the U.S. was plastering Afghanistan with leaflets promising giant rewards for bin Laden’s capture, was broadcasting radio messages with the same promise, and was dispensing great loads of Afghan money to tribal leaders who were being hired to search the vast number of caves for the elusive al Qaeda terrorist leader.
The greatest manhunt in history was thus underway, with British and U.S. Special Forces joining the search for bin Laden. Press reports buzzed with the latest tittle-tattle of bin Laden’s whereabouts and speculation raged concerning his fate and what his followers would do to avenge him, if killed. Newsweek claimed that bin Laden was now seen in many parts of the Middle East as a “loser” and embarrassment to Islam and Arabs (Nov. 26, 2001), but no one really knew what would happen after bin Laden’s capture or murder.
A split seemed to be widening at this crucial moment between the Bush administration and Britain and its European allies. European, UN spokespeople, and various humanitarian aid groups were calling for an immediate addressing of the humanitarian situation, wanting to get aid efforts underway for the starving and brutalized Afghan people, dying daily in refugee camps without adequate food, health care or shelter. The U.S., it seemed, was solely focused on the war effort, on getting Bin Laden and finishing up the Taliban. Britain had sent an advance group of troops to Bal to begin clearing the way for the aid effort and rebuilding Afghanistan and had thousands more ready to come, as did many European and other countries. The Northern Alliance, however, seemed not to want more foreign troops in the country as they secured their bases of power and the U.S. seemed to support this effort, publicly rebuking the British for sending troops and begin the humanitarian effort before conditions were ready.
A Washington Post report on November 22 that “Blair Denies Split Over War” reveals between the lines that in fact serious fissures had developed between Britain and Washington over military tactics, the next stage of the terror war, and when humanitarian efforts and nation-building should be started in Afghanistan and how they should be carried out. Meanwhile, the remaining Taliban and Al Qaeda forces were playing cat and mouse with the Northern Alliance and U.S. in the remaining Taliban strongholds of Kunduz and Kandahar. Mullah Omar’s photogenic new spokesperson pledged a fight to the death in Kandahar, told the world to “forget about September 11” deaths and focus on those being killed in Afghanistan by the U.S. bombings, a number he said to be around “2,000 civilians,” which British analysts accepted “probably after seven weeks of attacks” (Guardian, Nov. 22, 2001).
While claims of a cease-fire negotiation between the Northern Alliance and Taliban in Kunduz had been floating all week, on November 22 fighting broke out. Although conflicting tales circulated that a deal had been cut and that the fighting was due to “miscommunication,” Northern Alliance troops attacked the Taliban, who were simultaneously shelling their fronts at the same time that other Taliban were surrendering. U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had said that the rumored ten thousand or so Al Qaeda and Arab “fighters” holed up in Kunduz could not have save passage and many believed that they would fight to the end and that there would be a bloodbath in Kunduz.
On the eve of Thanksgiving Day on November 21, George W. Bush told thousands of cheering troops at Fort Campbell Kentucky that “Afghanistan is just the beginning of the war against terror.” The most difficult steps in this mission still lie ahead,” Bush warned, since “there are other terrorists who threaten America and our friends, and there are other nations willing to sponsor them.” Evoking the prospects of a long and bloody war and expounding on the “Bush doctrine,” the Resident vowed to go after any nation that harbors, trains, funds, or supports terrorists. This meant long and protracted battles ahead, which would require “sacrifices by our men and women in uniform,” but that would result in “complete” triumph over “evil.” Welcome to the brave new millennium of unending terror war.
The Battle for Kunduz, Prison Uprising, and the American Taliban
The battle for Kunduz raged on November 23 and reports of the plights of refugees, bloody atrocities on both sides, and a savage battle in the beleaguered city circulated, especially in the British press and broadcasting. There were daily reports of uncovering of Taliban atrocities against their enemies and Northern Alliance revenge killings throughout Afghanistan. Pockets of Taliban continued to fight on in the mountains and gangs roamed through the country, robbing and killing journalists, travelers, and others who set out on their dangerous roads. Some relief agencies were able to deliver supplies to the North, but in most of the country aid conveys continued to be robbed and controlled by local militia, and were soon shut down.
On November 24, many Taliban surrendered in Kunduz, but the fate of the foreign fighters was still at issue. There were reports that Pakistani helicopters were arriving in Kunduz to take out some of their citizens, even though the U.S. had demanded that none of the foreign Islamic fundamentalist warriors associated with the Taliban and Al Qaeda be allowed to escape. The Pentagon denied that they had themselves sent in helicopters to extricate Pakistanis, despite repeated reports by journalists who saw helicopters fly in and leave full of what appeared to be Pakistani troops. Perhaps the Northern Alliance and U.S. had allowed Pakistan itself to extricate some of its fighters as a payoff for support in the Afghanistan war. Pakistan had been extremely upset by seeing its client Taliban regime collapse and one senior official had told the New York Times that “Rumsfeld’s been extremely callous” in his refusal to allow negotiations for the surrender of the foreign fighters (Nov. 25, 2001).[48]
Senior British officials also criticized the “belligerent” language of U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld who had insisted that the U.S. was “not inclined to negotiate surrenders” and did not want to allow Islamic fighters to escape, a position that British officials claimed sent a message to the Northern Alliance that they had carte blanche to slaughter foreign troops. Indeed, “foreigners” were being blamed by many Afghan groups for its country’s troubles and there were discoveries throughout the land of mass graves in which slaughtered foreign troops had been buried, including one in Mazar-I-Shariff that reportedly contained over 600 bodies (Guardian, November 24, 2001).
There were accounts that some of the foreign allies of the Taliban were fighting to the end in Kunduz, that they had held the families of fighters and the Taliban in ransom, threatening to kill them if they surrendered or defected. There were also widespread stories that the Arab fighters had killed hundreds of Taliban in Kunduz who had chosen to surrender. Hence, fears of a bloodbath continued to intensify, even as some Taliban forces surrendered. In addition, there continued to be reports of heavy civilian casualties from U.S. bombing in the Kunduz area, with new reports of villagers being bombed by the Americans and even Northern Alliance troops getting hit (Independent, Nov. 24, 2001).[49] Al Jazeera, the Arab satellite TV network whose office had been bombed and destroyed in Kabul, reported that the U.S. had bombed suspected Taliban camps in Pakistan and that some bombs had gone astray and killed civilians - a story later confirmed by Western journalists and admitted by Pentagon officials.
On November 25 in Kunduz, hundreds of Taliban and “foreign fighters” surrendered and were taken to a fortress outside of Masar-I-Shariff. After 12 days of siege and several days of bloody fighting, Kunduz had surrendered on November 26. Northern Alliance troops began marching into the city when it appeared that thousands of Taliban and foreign fighters had surrendered, with many of the former embracing their Northern Alliance “brothers” and pledging if necessary to kill Taliban in the city, who had been their allies the day before! It came out that numerous Islamic fighters, however, had escaped and there were now reports that for the past two weeks Pakistan had sent in nightly helicopter landings taking out groups of Pakistani and other fighters from Kunduz; it was unclear if the U.S. knew about and sanctioned these rescue operations, as it had made clear that it did not want any of the foreign fighters working for the Taliban and Al Qaeda to be allowed to escape.
Opposing Northern Alliance forces entered Kunduz from the east and west and competed for spoils, of which trucks were the prime target. Bands of Taliban resisted and were summarily murdered; in house to house operations other Taliban were arrested and the streets were full of dead bodies, some with their hands tied behind their backs, and probably executed. British first-hand newspaper accounts tended to stress the revenge killings and atrocities, while U.S. papers stressed jubilance that the Taliban had again been routed and a city “liberated.”[50]
Meanwhile, a prison revolt had erupted in the fortress outside of Masar-I-Shariff where the foreign fighters who had surrendered from Kunduz had been taken. A preview of trouble brewing ahead in the surrender occurred on November 25 when one of the Arab Islamists exploded a grenade, killing two top Northern Alliance commanders and wounding a British ITN journalist. The next day, in one of the more bizarre and grisly episodes of the war, a prison riot erupted, the prisoners took over weapons from an armory and a bloodbath was on, with U.S. and British Special Forces firing on the rebelling prisoners, calling in airstrikes, and working closely with the Northern Alliance to crush the revolt that continued into the next week. Reporters on the scene predicted that “hundreds” of the prisoners were being killed in one of the bloodier events of the war, and the Pentagon confirmed this estimate later in the day, while denying reports that a U.S. soldier had been killed in the fight.
Over the weekend, fighting in Kunduz went on and the violent prison uprising at XX continued through a second and into a third day. U.S. and British special forces were called in to help quell the insurrection in the Northern Alliance prison fortress, and U.S. observers called in military strikes that killed many of the insurgent Arabs but also wounded Americans and killed Northern Alliance troops in “friendly fire.” The U.S. military admitted that five of its men had been wounded when a bomb went astray, a CIA employee was killed as the revolt unfolded, and the Northern Alliance lost about 40 soldiers, while hundreds of the prisoners were slayen.
Initial reports from a Time magazine reporter to his editor indicated that the Northern Alliance prisoners first seized a British newspaper reporter and then rioted. Yet a later report claimed that prisoners were enraged when an American CIA official started interrogating them, leading to a riot and seizure of arms in the prison fortress. There was also speculation that the Northern Alliance forces had allowed the uprising to take place, so that they could slaughter the foreigner fighters, although others alleged that the foreign fighters had planned a suicidal uprising all along. Retrospective reports, however, confirmed by several news sources, suggested that the foreign fighters had been told in Kunduz where they had surrendered that they would be taken to Kandahar, where the Taliban were still holding out, and were outraged when they learned that they would be incarcerated in a Northern Alliance prison.[51]
After three days of fighting, tanks were brought in to fire on the remaining rebel prisoners and reporters came in and photographed hundreds of dead bodies. Both the Red Cross and Amnesty International called for an investigation of the uprising and its bloody suppression, and the global media circulated gruesome pictures of mutilated bodies and hair-raising accounts of the bloody uprising and its suppression. But the macabre story refused to die, like a demon who just won’t expire. The following day, as Red Cross workers gathered the corpses for identification and burial, there was shooting from the basement, two of the Red Cross workers were slightly wounded and forced to flee and a third was captured. Initial reports were of a lone gunman hiding in the basement who had survived the violent assault on the fortress, but two more days of exchanged gunshots and fighting suggested more prisoner survivors. Finally, almost a week after the uprising began, the Northern Alliance poured water in the basement of the building where foreigner fighters had holed up, after bombs, grenades, and even boiling oil had failed to roust them from their basement sanctuary.
On December 1, more than 80 wounded, famished, and near dying foreign Islamic fighters emerged from the basement of the fortress with horrible tales of the siege. One claimed to be from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and many were shell-shocked and dying. Reporters on the scene prevented Northern Alliance troops from killing some of them immediately and the Red Cross arrived to give them food and medical care, as they were carted off to hospitals and prisons, no doubt capable of a tale worthy of Dostoevsky or Conrad.
Indeed, a bizarre story emerged when U.S. Special Forces operatives approached the alleged American in a Northern Alliance hospital and whisked him away for interrogation. A CNN stringer interviewed the young man, who said he was man John Walker, a U.S. citizen from Washington, D.C. who had gone to study Islam in Pakistan and joined the Taliban.[52] When his parents recognized him in the video, they affirmed that he was indeed John Philip Walker Lindh and that they had not heard from him since early this year. A Los Angeles Times story identified him as “a sweet, shy kid from Marin County” who had grown up in the San Francisco area (Dec. 3, 2001). No doubt his adventures with the Taliban would generate countless tabloid stories and perhaps a TV-movie.
The story of the American Taliban generated tremendous media attention in the U.S. and elsewhere, and was clearly one of the more bizarre aspects of the surreal Terror War. Later accounts claimed that Walker, as a teenager in California, was taken with the Internet and hip-hop culture, taking on a wigger identity in Internet chat rooms. Walker became interested in Islam and reportedly converted after reading the Autobiography of Malcolm X. After studying Arabic and Islam in San Francisco, Walker traveled to Yemen to pursue his Arabic studies, and then went to a religious school in Pakistan where he was recruited to the Taliban who sent him to Afghanistan where he ended up a survivor from the Qala-I-Jangi prison uprising.
The son of divorced parents, John Walker took on his mother’s maiden name and allegedly received his first name as an homage to John Lennon. Clearly, Walker was acting out Lennon’s song “Imagine,” but gave shortshrift to “Just Give Peace a Chance.” Walker was obviously a poster child of hybridized postmodern identities, moving from hip-hop to Malcolm X to Islam and an especially virulent Al Qaeda fundamentalism. The Internet leaves a long trail and there was evidence that at one point in his hip-hop phase, Walker appeared to pose as an African American, writing: “Our blackness should not make white people hate us.” From wigger, Walker mutated into a convert to Islam querying a hip-hop site in 1997 if the rapper Nas “is indeed a ‘God,’” then “why does he smoke blunts, drink Moet, fornicate, and make dukey music? That’s a rather pathetic ‘god’ if you ask me” (cited from Newsweek, Dec. 17, 2001).
Walker’s conversion to Islam took him to Yemen and then Pakistan and he allegedly attempted to memorize as much as he could from the Koran and to intently study Islam. The dramatic switch of identities, which took him to fight with the Taliban in Afghanistan and to emerge barely alive from the prison uprising, illustrates a postmodern mutation and hybridization of identities. In the contemporary era, media and global culture offer the youth of the world a wide range of identities, that can be discarded and recalibrated at will. The American Taliban suggests that postmodern identity is unstable, flexible, and a construct that can be easily changed, refined, and fine-tuned. Presumably, as Walker faced death in Afghanistan, he realized that reconstituting himself as an American would help his survival and in the days to come he would reportedly cooperate with U.S. intelligence, but did not initially interact with the U.S. troops who guarded him as a prisoner.
After news of Walker’s arrest, his father frequently went on television to defend his son and hired a lawyer to help him with his legal difficulties. There was a fierce debate over whether Walker was a traitor and should be tried for treason or was just a confused “poor fellow,” as compassionate conservative George W. Bush suggested. Conservatives, however, went after Walker with a vengeance, calling for his trial and execution. Former prosecutor Nancy Grace, for instance, went on television repeatedly calling for Walker’s execution, even though she did not know the facts of his story. Andrew Sullivan used the Walker saga to savage liberal California culture, making Walker a bad boy poster child for permissive education and mindless liberalism. Sullivan created an ideal-type comparison between Walker, dismissed as a freak of California liberalism, in comparison to the heroic CIA agent, Johnny Spann, who interviewed Walker just before the prison uprising and his own murder, an event taped by Afghan TV and later show throughout the world. Sullivan presented Spann as a paradigm of American conservative small-town rectitude and goodness.[53] Such comparisons are absolutely ludicrous, of course, since Sullivan could not possibly know the complexities of both lives and such a simplistic good/evil dichotomy is precisely the glaring sore and sign of stupidity of contemporary conservativism that constantly dichotomizes the world into good versus evil, as did Sullivan and his hero George W. Bush.
Walker was also used to attack liberal pedagogy, when the Associated Press, falsely as it turns out, quoted his high school principle, Marcie Miller, as saying that she was “proud” of Walker. This led to a serious of vicious attacks on Miller and a whole arsenal of rightwing assaults on permissive liberal education. As it turned out, Miller had merely said that she was “proud” of the fine students that her school system had turned out, and never praised Walker in particular (see Anthony York, “The proud principal who wasn,’t” (Salon, Jan. 4, 2001).
Later, it was claimed that Walker’s father came out as gay (see The National Enquirer, Jan x, 2001), creating another wave of commentary on disfunctional liberal families and covert attacks on gays. It would indeed be interesting to see how the Walker saga played out, as he was put in custody with the American military, questioned concerning his knowledge of Al Qaeda, and became a subject of intense debate with the military, the Bush administration, and the public. In some of the first public interrogations whose results were leaked to the press, Walker was said to warn of dire Al Qaeda biological terrorist attacks imminently planned on the U.S., culminating in a major apocalypse that would “destroy America,” though such threats were dismissed as “Taliban fire-talk.” Walker allegedly later claimed that he had undergone Al Qaeda training, and had even met the great man, Osama Bin Laden himself, leading conservatives to describe him as the “crown jewel in the Al Qaeda arsenal,” or a “pet” of Bin Laden, who was being groomed for diabolical attacks on the U.S. Another account, however, claimed that Walker had told investigators that he choose to fight with the Taliban rather than choose “martyrdom training” which would involve potential terrorist attacks. In any case, Walker’s adventures with Al Qaeda undermine the argument put out by Western intelligence apologists who defended their failures to anticipate the September 11 terrorist attacks by claiming that Al Qaeda could not be infiltrated, as Walker obviously had.
Another very strange story in early December recounted how ten Uzbek Taliban warriors who had surrendered with the fall of Kunduz had been sent to a hospital in Taloqan for medical treatment, aroused the suspicions of a Northern Alliance officer who searched them and found hand grenades and other weapons. Evidently, the Uzbek’s had been trying to get major Northern Alliance officials and the media to talk to them and planned a suicide mission. One wondered indeed how many former Taliban fighters were wandering Afghanistan and what mayhem they would unleash (Washington Post, Dec. 3, 2001).
Meanwhile, new stories indicated that U.S. Special Forces were widely roaming through Afghanistan, who were “licensed to kill” and had allegedly executed hundreds.[54] The manhunt to catch Bin Laden continued with the U.S. bringing in more troops, ships to patrol the coast, and there were pictures broadcast on BBC television of U.S. officials doling out packages of U.S. dollars to pay Afghans to search the caves for Bin Laden, with estimates of the costs of the operation reaching a cool one billion. Bin Laden sightings continued and rumors that he was fleeing on horseback were bandied about. Other stories claimed that Al Qaeda had ten Bin Laden look-a-likes who were appearing throughout Afghanistan to confuse his hunters.
The honorable people of the UN made their first airlift of food and humanitarian supplies in a race against time in northern Afghanistan. As winter relentlessly approached, starving and freezing refugees received food, blankets, and other essentials. Many international aid agencies were prepared to deliver supplies, emphasizing that the need was crucial, and criticized the U.S. for not helping to facilitate deliveries. U.S. ration packets continued to be yellow, the same color as cluster bombs, “which has meant many Afghans are too terrified to approach them” (Independent, Nov. 24, 2001). And there was a report that a parachuted U.S. aid pallet smashed into a house, wrecking the building (Los Angeles Times, Nov. 24, 2001: A16).
A major split had emerged between Britain/Europe and the U.S. on the continued strategy for waging war in Afghanistan. Many leaders in Britain and Europe were urging that humanitarian supplies be delivered immediately to the millions of starving and homeless people in refugee camps in Afghanistan, some in quite desperate straits, as press and non-U.S. broadcasting made clear in dramatic reports. The U.S., however, made it clear that it was not going to allow humanitarian efforts until the military phase was over. There were several reports that the U.S. commander of the operation, Tommy Franks, was strongly opposed to humanitarian efforts which he believed would complicate his campaign and that the Pentagon and Bush administration supported him. Accordingly, U.S. officials came out formally against humanitarian efforts on November 30, making it clear that the U.S. had subordinated human efforts to the military campaign.
A New York Times story by Elizabeth Becker, “Level of Food Aid to Afghan Drops” (Nov. 29, 2001), detailed the difficulties in getting relief supplies to the Afghan people, the decline in deliveries due to chaotic situation of war, and the desperate need for supplies. The British had sent troops to Afghanistan in mid-November to begin what was intended as a securing of conditions to make possible major relief efforts. But both the Northern Alliance and U.S. opposed putting European or foreign troops in Afghanistan at present for humanitarian goals, underlining the unilateral nature of the Afghan war and questioning the seriousness of U.S. commitment to the Afghan people.
On the domestic front, a few honorable people resisted the draconian police state anti-terrorist policies set forth by the Bush administration. Oregon police refused to question hundreds of young Muslims put on a list for interrogations with no specific reasons spelled out. Some U.S. senators were starting to question the U.S. Attorney General, the Ayotollah Ashcroft, who had detained 1,200 people and refused to even give a list of the suspects’ names to Congress. In a ceremony in Washington, D.C. to dedicate the Justice Department building to Robert Kennedy, one of his daughters said in a well-publicized statement: “My daughter, Cara, is here today. Cara, if anyone tries to tell you this is the type of justice your grandpa would embrace, don’t you believe it,” a sharp rebuke to the Bush administration.
Spain was refusing to turn over eight men suspected in the September 11 attacks until the U.S. assured them that they were to be given an open trial and not subjected to the Kangaroo Court military trials that the Bush administration was planning for “terrorist” suspects. Europeans were becoming increasingly critical of Bush administration proposals to deal with the legal-judicial dimensions of the terrorist problem. Political commentators attacked the U.S. Attorney General for rewriting laws of the so-called “U.S. Patriot Act” without consulting Congress; abridging by decree the Freedom of Information Act; allowing eavesdropping on conversations between lawyers and clients suspected of terrorism; and justifying military tribunals for suspects, while refusing to meet with Congress to explain his police-state measures.[55]
Meanwhile, television pundits became especially exercised over the closure of the White House to tourists over the holidays for security reasons. On the CNN program Capital Gang, for instance, on November 24 both liberal and conservative pundits went on and on about the threat to the open society and concessions to terrorism involved in shutting down the White House to tourists over the holidays, while failing to engage the more serious issues. The next day on Cross-Fire, only the most conservative member, Robert Novack, took the Bush administration to task for their jihad against civil liberties.
In a revealing column, the usually-liberal Maureen Dowd explained reluctance on behalf of the liberal establishment to criticize Ashcroft and the Bush administration assault on civil liberties as an expression of genuine fear and a belief that extreme measures were necessary to fight the terrorist threat. Dowds’ confession uncovered U.S. liberals’ half-hearted commitment to an open and free society, and cowardly failure to attack the agents and instruments of the coming police-military state.[56] The next day conservative New York Times columnist William Safire, however, wrote a stinging attack against “Kangaroo Courts,” arguing that the Bush administration was carrying out a “dismaying departure from due process” and endangered legal prosecution of the war against terrorism by driving Spain and European Union countries to distance themselves from U.S. legal extremism, thus undermining the international coalition against global terrorism (Nov. 26, 2001).
The honorable Senator Patrick Leahy (Dem.-V) scheduled Senate Judiciary Committee hearings to deal with the Bush administration assault on civil liberties. Attorney General Ashcroft had agreed to come and it would be interesting to hear the man defend himself who Ralph Neas of the People for the American Way called “the most dangerous threat to civil liberties in the federal government” who was waging a “relentless assault on constitutional rights and civil liberties.” Ashcroft himself appeared in a press conference on November 27 saying of the 1,200 or so arrested 538 remain in Federal custody. Ashcroft refused to give out the names of those not yet charged on the grounds that it was be a “blacklist” and claimed that Al Qaeda members were among the detainees, although some were skeptical.
Continuing to intensify his relentless assault on civil liberties and the open society, the Ayatollah Ashcroft announced on November 29 that his “Justice” Department was offering “incentives” for foreigners interested in U.S. citizenship to provide useful information on terrorists. With the Orwellian title of “responsible cooperators program,” Ashcroft offered “visa assistance” and a “pathway to citizenship” for those who provided information on terrorists. Cooperative informers would be eligible for the “S via,” sometimes referred to as the “snitch visa,” offering would-be stoolies privileged access to the much desired and hard to get green card and U.S. citizenship.
Even more disturbing, the next day it was reported in the New York Times that Ashcroft was “seeking to free F.B.I. to Spy on Groups” (Dec. 1, 2001). Ashcroft was reportedly moving to undo restrictions on the FBI established to curb their abuses in domestic spying in the 1960s and 1970s, when J. Edgar Hoover used a “Cointelpro” program against anti-war activists, Martin Luther King and civil rights leaders, and other domestic groups. It has been astonishing that no one has come right out and called for Ashcroft’s resignation. A highly controversial rightwing extremist, Ashcroft has gone further than any government official in U.S. history to cut back on civil liberties and he is now a clear and present danger to the survival of U.S. democracy. It is a sign of the contempt that the Bush administration hold for democracy and pluralism that they chose the ultraright and Talibanesque Ashcroft as U.S. Attorney General, allowing him to push the most extreme reactionary policies in a time of national crisis.
The problem, of course, is that George W. Bush and key players in his administration are themselves hardright extremists and Ashcroft is an expression of the dominant Bush administration ideology and its deeply antidemocratic tendencies. Commentators have begun talking of the Bush reign as an “imperial presidency,” one that has relentlessly and quickly undone the balance of power within federal branches, seizing power for the presidency unthinkable in the past. Bush vigorously defended his war tribunals scheme on November 29, which would allow him personally to choose who would be subject to secret military tribunals set up to deal with terrorists.
It is highly ironic that the most imperial presidency of recent times would be constructed for a man who many judge the most incompetent, unqualified, and partisan president in memory. Previously, George W. Bush was perceived as highly disengaged, not interested in the details of foreign or domestic policy, and more committed to his compulsive daily exercise regime and long weekends and holiday than affairs of state. Of course, Bush has always served as figure-head for the small group of individuals who surround him and program his every move and gesture, and his political handlers, Dick Cheney and other rightwing associates are the ones who are formulating the hardright policies that Bush is figure-head for.
In any case, U.S. democracy is entering a highly perilous and challenging stage as the Bush administration continues to seize and augment presidential power, upsetting the delicate balance of power upon which democracy depends. The mainstream corporate broadcasting media continue to promote patriotism and war fever, while disquieting analyses of the threat to democracy circulate through the press and Internet. Indeed, corporate television and other media continue to be mouthpieces for expanding military intervention and continually intensifying the military dimension of the war on terrorism.
On the dishonorable front, bellicose armchair warriors urged the Bush administration to take on Iraq to get rid of Saddam Hussein, including Dick Morris, Clinton’s pollster thrown out of office when it was revealed that he regularly rented a hotel room to suck prostitute’s toes as he briefed Clinton on the domestic implications of foreign policy (see “On to Baghdad!, New York Post, Nov. 20, 2001). Wire services reported on November 25, however, that the next phase of the Bush administration war against terrorism would probably involve strikes against suspected Al Qaeda-related terrorist camps in Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, and perhaps the Philippines. Yet in an especially bellicose public statement on November 26 Bush threatened action against countries like Iraq who were producing “weapons of mass destruction” and threatened Iraq with military attack, insisting that Afghanistan “is just the beginning.”
As for the anthrax wars, scientists had concluded that the deadly Ames strain had certainly originated in U.S. Defense Department chemical weapons facilities, although it still wasn’t clear who had sent the letters (Washington Post, Nov. 25, 2001). Thus, the anthrax that had caused deaths in Washington and New York and panicked the nation originated from dangerous U.S. weapons programs, another blowback of Cold War lunacy.[57] Eventually, by December 17, Bush administration officials themselves were forced to admit that that the anthrax had originated in U.S. government labs and agencies like the CIA and other defense institutions scrambled to deny that they had allowed the release of the highly toxic and dangerous anthrax strain that continued to infest the U.S. Senate building and that had taken at least five victims.
The anthrax hysteria provided in retrospect a rorshak test in which protagonists could project their preferred villains as the culprits. George W. Bush recklessly insinuated it was Bin Laden and Al Qaeda, further demonizing the demons of dire darkness. Those in the Bush administration and elsewhere desiring war against Iraq were leaking disinformation that the anthrax had the fingerprints of Saddam Hussein on it. Leftists were convinced that it was a U.S. rightwing militant group that had sent it, since largely liberal senators and media organizations were targeted. The FBI was concluding that it was a lone lunatic, like the Unabomber, who was responsible, while the German Greenpeace reported that they had received information that the anthrax was sent by someone in the biochemical weapons establishment to secure more funds and attention for their programs. Anti-Bush conspiracy theorists saw it as a weapon of the Bush administration to wipe out liberal senators and media and create hysteria that would help in carrying out their Terror War and Jihad against civil liberties and the constitution.
Anthrax jitters continued to circulate as hoaxers sent white powder and occasional spores showed up here and there, an outgrowth, perhaps, of the potent earlier dissemination. Anthrax-vaccines were strongly urged for government officials, who were also considering a national smallpox vaccination program. Furthermore, officials were also worrying over the disappearance of a Harvard University biology professor who was an expert in potentially deadly viruses, such as Ebola (Boston Globe, Nov. 24, 2001).
Domestic weirdness continued to multiply. An Indian man and his wife who had survived the World Trade Center bombings were popular on the evangelical belt as the man told rapt listeners how Jesus saved him from disaster (see “Bible Belt worships terror survivor, The Times, Nov. 24, 2001). A pastor in Idaho put up an anti-Muslim church sign that read: “The spirit of Islam is the spirit of the antichrist” (The Idaho Statesman, Nov. 22, 2001). And a New York Times article documented how “Apocalyptic Theology Revitalized by Attacks” (Nov. 23, 2001), encouraging speculation that the end of the world war was near and Jesus’ Second Coming was on the horizon.
Strangeness and horror continued to emanate from Afghanistan. As anti-Taliban troops surrounded the remaining Taliban stronghold of Kandahar, Mullah Omar released increasingly hysterical and shrill calls for Jihad against the Americans and demands that his followers fight to the death and not surrender, at a time when rational Taliban in Kandahar were allegedly negotiating surrender with local Pashtun tribes and foreign Islamic fighters were attempting to flee from the city. Mullah Omar allegedly had also put out a $50,000 bounty on the heads of foreign journalists and it was indeed dangerous for journalists in Afghanistan with several getting killed in late November and BBC pulling its staff from the north of the country because of increasing violence.
There were also reports (perhaps U.S. disinformation) that Bin Laden was becoming increasingly paranoid, that he might fall victim to Afghan betrayal, and that his end was near. One could only imagine what was going through the Al Qaeda leader’s head as bombing intensified in Kandahar and southern Afghanistan. One also wondered what was going on in Dick Cheney’s head as the Vice President hid in his mountain retreat, plotting Bin Laden’s end and the next stage in Bush administration robbery of federal funds for their corporate clients. Cheney had reportedly been paid severance of $31 to $36 million dollars when he left Halliburton oil to become Vice President, and he repaid the industry with many favors during his months in office (see Kellner 2001). When Enron president Ken Lay complained that the powerful energy regulatory agency FERC was not responsive to his demands, according to a PBS Frontline documentary and several news accounts, Cheney bounced the head of the energy regulatory agency and put in a more compliant one.
Cheney had also allowed Enron President Lay and other big oil company officials to sit in and determine U.S. energy policy and served his former industry big time. But in November the once mighty energy company Enron collapsed in one of the major meltdowns in U.S. financial history and George W. Bush and Dick Cheney’s good friend Ken Lay, perhaps the biggest financial supporter of the Bush administration, was in disgrace. Did Cheney worry that he too could be undone at any moment, with exposure of his own many shady maneuvers on behalf of the oil and defense industries? As the President of Halliburton, Cheney had received a spectacular $33 million severance pay, a bonus to make sure he would view the interests of the oil and defense industry giant positively and act accordingly. While CEO of Halliburton, Cheney had done highly questionable business deals with Iraq, on a prohibited enemy list, had lied about it to the media, and faced exposure for his Iraq dealings. As Cheney assembled the Bush administration team, he made sure that personnel sympathetic to the interests of his favorite corporations and industries, and biggest Bush-Cheney campaign contributors, would receive favors and in the first months of the Bush administration provided stunning largesse and payback (see Kellner 2001, Chapter 11).
If the media ever focused on Cheney’s business and political career, Big Dick would be in big-time deep doo-doo. Knowing the morass of slime, corruption, and crime that he, Enron, Halliburton, and the many members of the Bush administration that criss-crossed between big business and big politics were mired in must create sleepless nights and worrisome days (one wonders what medications the Cheney’s and Bush were on to manage their anxiety levels?). And as Bin Laden’s health declined in his retreat, how was Cheney, who had four major heart attacks, holding up under pressure? What demons drove the demonic Bin Laden to carry out such a mad Jihad and what drove Cheney to such ferocious Jihad for the rightwing and oil corporations? Both of these figures represented the extremes of contending factions of the contemporary era, Islamic Jihad and rightwing militarist and corporate capital, locked in fierce battle with the world as their playground.
In Afghanistan, possible endgames were emerging for the U.S. military intervention. Shortly after the fall of Kundoz, it was announced on November 26 that over 1,000 Marines had landed north of Kandahar and that the U.S. “owned a piece of Afghanistan,” establishing a beachhead for military action against Kandahar and surveillance of roads leading from the city. Reports circulated that the Taliban had given up the Afghan border city of Spin Boldak, and that anti-Taliban troops now controlled most of the roads from the city which was becoming surrounded by all sides. Southern tribal leaders negotiated with Taliban friends in Kandahar for peaceful surrender, although it was rumored that Mullah Omar, his Taliban faithful, and the foreign fighters would go down swinging.
For people of honor, once again an opportunity for a splendid exit was offered. Negotiations were underway in the south of Afghanistan to surrender Kandahar, and the honorable people of Afghanistan were in Germany opening a conference to negotiate a peaceful future for the country. The Taliban were collapsing, Bin Laden and Al Qaeda were on the run and now was the time to criminalize them, send in Special Forces from around the world to arrest the Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders guilty of crimes against humanity. There was a long list of crimes committed by both groups, and documentation of their domestic crimes and planned terrorist activities were being assembled throughout the country. It would be very instructive for the world to get a clear picture of the vicious reign of the Taliban and diabolical Al Qaeda terrorist plots, in particular showing the Islamic world that these groups were harming Islam and were antithetical to its spirit and teachings.
The U.S. was lucky that the Jihad movement had not been more explosive, that support for Bin Laden and the Taliban was isolated, and that the Islamic world was turning against them as more and more their actual and planned crimes were being documented. Now was the time to make Bin Laden and the Al Qaeda outcasts in the Muslim world, global bandits who were an embarrassment to Islam. Now was the time to begin dealing seriously with the Afghan refugee problem, and to begin rebuilding the country. Crucially, now was the time for the U.S. to begin mending its fences with the Arab and Muslim world, rather than presenting itself as the world policeman and murderer of Arabs, as many Middle Eastern papers were doing, as they continued to circulate pictures and stories of U.S. bombing damage on Arab and Muslim civilians.
But instead of helping to negotiate a peace and mending relations between U.S. and Arab-Islamic world, Bush became increasingly bellicose, warning the U.S. that it was entering a “dangerous period” and stressing that Afghanistan is “just the beginning” in the war on terrorism. In the bragging mode, Bush said that “we’re smoking them out” and warned Iraq that it was next if it did not allow UN inspectors back in to check if it had truly dismantled its weapons of mass destruction program. Political commentators noted that delivering an ultimatum is not a good way to begin serious negotiations and as Iraq rejected Bush’s challenge, U.S. warplanes attacked Iraq’s “no-fly” zone on November 27.
Obviously, the Bush administration wanted to continue and widen the war and keep it going. Although the situation in Afghanistan was hardly stabilized and Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders remained at large, speculation buzzed about who the U.S. would bomb next and how long it would be until Saddam Hussein was in Bush’s cross-hairs. Of course, there was still much unfinished business in Afghanistan to deal with first, however, as Bin Laden and the Al Qaeda leadership remained at large and there remained dangerous Taliban forces roaming around the country.
By November 27, Spin Boldak’s control was in question and in a fight with Taliban troops four British Special Troops were wounded in a gun battle north of Kandahar. U.S. Marines who were setting up camp near the Kandahar airport also engaged Taliban fighters and the Pentagon announced that warplanes bombed a compound southeast of Kandahar said to be used by leaders of the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and Al Wafa, an Islamic foundation accused of terrorist activities. The Pentagon claimed that they had discovered 40 sites where chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons might be produced and were investigating to see what had actually been produced at these sites.
But there also disquieting and proliferating reports that civilian casualties from U.S. bombing were on the rise in Afghanistan. Moreover, more and more displaced civilians were blaming U.S. bombing for their plight, creating dangers of future anti-Americanism and assaults on Americans as payback for the bloody Afghan wars, raising the specter of the possibility of intensifying anti-Americanism throughout the Arab world as a consequence of the U.S. bombing. An article by Rory McCarthy in the British Guardian, “U.S. planes rain death on the innocent” (Dec. 1, 2001), tells of how earlier bombings in Kabul destroyed villages and killed scores of civilians near the Afghan capital, leading the journalist to conclude: “Evidence of destruction on the ground and accounts from dozens of witnesses point to a devastating pattern of inaccuracy by U.S. bombers, in sharp contrast to Pentagon assertions of precision bombing.”
Horrifying stories proliferated through the world media on December 2 concerning extensive bombing of civilians in the Tora Bora area, where Bin Laden was said by some to be holed up in the caves and underground tunnels partly built by the CIA when they supported Islamic extremists in the battle against the Soviet-backed Afghan government in the 1980s. Accounts in various media listed the civilian victims of Tora Bora U.S. bombings to be from 20-200 dead and scores wounded. Although the U.S. military claimed that they checked their records and had not bombed the villages in question, global television showed scores of victims in Jalalabad hospitals.
Northern Alliance foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah announced the same day that his sources indicated that Bin Laden was not in the Tora Bora cave complexes, but around Kandahar where anti-Taliban forces had surrounded the city and were preparing for what they hoped was the final offensive. There were reports of intensified fighting on December 2 and that U.S. and British Special Forces were fighting in the area and that U.S. ground troops might be brought in to take Kandahar.
A story by Paul Harris in The Observer, “Warlords bring new terrors,” described the chaos in southern Afghanistan where warlords had returned to a reign of robbery, rape, and murder. The dogs of war had been unleashed and they were snapping in fury. There had been reports that the U.S. had investigated the alleged execution of 160 Taliban by Northern Alliance forces in the Kandahar area in the presence of U.S. Special Forces (Independent, Nov. 29, 2001). While a Pentagon spokesperson said that they concluded no evidence of a massacre had been ascertained, it was clear that the war had let loose an orgy of bloodshed, retaliation, and barbarism, implicating the U.S. in one of the most violent episodes in recent history.
Moreover, an article by Paul Watson and Lisa Getter, “Silent Peril Lies in Wait for Afghanistan’s People” (Los Angeles Times, Dec. 1, 2001), documented continued civilian casualties by unexploded cluster bombs, noting that the U.S. had dropped 600 of these highly dangerous bombs, each of which had 202 bomblets, thus “leaving about 6,000 potential deathtraps on the ground.” Reacting against excessive U.S. use of cluster bombs, several groups, including Landmind Action and Princess Diana’s Memorial Fund, called for international controls on the use of cluster bombs.
The intense bombing of Kandahar continued as anti-Taliban forces approached the city from each side, refugees fled, and the area was said to be enveloped in an all-encompassing cloud of dust raised by the continuously pounding bombing. Reports came out as well that “U.S. bombs hit wrong target for second time in two days” (Independent, Dec. 3, 2001): “A senior mujahedin commander said U.S. strikes killed more than 100 civilians around Agam, 25 miles south of Jalalabad, on top of at least 70 killed in air raids on Saturday night. At least eight of the latest victims were guards and government officials of the Eastern Shura, the council of anti-Taliban mujahedin leaders who now hold eastern Afghanistan.” Once again, the U.S. seems to have made a grievious targeting error and television images over the weekend were full of images of maimed bodies and wounded civilians, hit by U.S. bombing mistakes. Once again, the Pentagon denied the claims of mistaken targeting. As reported in the New York Times (Dec. 3, 2001):
Claims of significant civilian casualties from errant weapons in that region this weekend were again denied today by the United States Central Command. A senior military spokesman at the command's headquarters in Tampa, Fla., said that surveillance and intelligence reports had been re-examined, and that no weapons had gone off-target.
"We have reviewed all targets that were struck over the past 24 hours or so in this area, roughly from Jalalabad to the Pakistan border," said Rear Adm. Craig R. Quigley, the deputy Pentagon spokesman. "We hit everything that we have shot at. No weapons went awry. We struck no unintentional targets."
But news from a multitude of sources asserted that the U.S. had bombed at least four villages in error, with confirmation of these accounts by reporters, and copious television pictures of interviews with Afghans seriously wounded by U.S. bombing, all suggesting that targeting errors had been made. In an article, for instance, “A village is destroyed. And America says nothing happened,” Richard Lloyd Parry visited the village of Kama Ado, in the Tora Bora area, and given vivid description of the destruction of a village upon which American B052s unloaded a dozen bombs that alleged killed 115 men, women and children (Independent, Dec. 4, 2001).
A Washington Post article reported on “mounting outrage over the U.S. bombing campaign. At a council of tribal elders in Jalalabad’s central mosque, the assembled leaders passed a resolution condemning the attacks and demanding an immediate end to the bombings. Said Jamal, a deputy to Jalalabad’s mayor, said local authorities have been overwhelmed with complaints in recent days from villagers demanding a halt to the air attacks. ‘People are very unhappy about this American bombardment against civilians,’ ha said. ‘They are very angry. Now they are saying they don’t like Americans’” (Dec. 4, 2001). Once again a Pentagon spokesperson, Rear Adm. John D. Stufflebeem, insisted: “We know there were no off-target hits, so there were no collateral damage worries in this series of strikes. I don’t have any reports of any villages being struck. And all reports I have is that all of our weapons have been on target.”
Disturbingly, U.S. military officials were entering the lying and denial mode as they had so many times before in Vietnam, the Gulf war, and other interventions (see Kellner 1992). Of course, lying and treachery were norms in Afghanistan, so the specific civilian casualty stories in questions could be disinformation. However, reputable reporters from both U.S. and British newspapers and television had well-documented the reports, raising the question of why the U.S. military did not simply admit to making targeting mistakes (perhaps they had been told that Taliban or Al Qaeda officials were in the villages bombed) and apologize for civilian casualties rather than obfuscating.
Meanwhile, more and more U.S. troops, as well as some from Britain and other countries, poured into the undisclosed U.S. camp in the vicinity of Kandahar. This build-of troops raised speculation that U.S. and allied forces would be used in an assault on or a sweep of Kandahar if anti-Taliban Afghan groups could not negotiate a surrender or capture the city itself. U.S. officials repeated their insistence that Mullah Omar and top Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders could not negotiate release and would be held accountable by the U.S., and the world waited to see the fate of the Taliban regime unfold.
Over the weekend of December 2-3, Israel experienced its most deadly 24-hour reign of terror ever, with a half-dozen major attacks, including suicide bombings in Jerusalem and Haifa, that left at least 26 dead and scores injured. There were fierce calls for retaliation, intense pressure on Arafat and the PLO to arrest the perpetrators, and an immediate Israeli military response which created a situation in which Israel and the Middle East could explode into major war at any moment. There were speculations that Palestinian groups like Hamas were linked to Al Qaeda and were promoting Bin Laden’s dream of an all-out war between Muslims and Jews, Christians, and the West. The stakes in Middle Eastern politics were raised, Israelis booed the Bush administration peace mediator General Zinni, and the long-term failures to create peace between Israel and Palestine and the new war against terrorism had created a situation of unparalleled danger.
Not surprisingly, negotiations in Bonn between competing Afghan forces were multiplying problems and complexities. There appeared to be a split in the Northern Alliance between the Old Guard, centered around Rabbani, the President of Afghanistan from 1992-1996 before the Taliban took over, and recognized as president by the UN, and the younger members who appeared more flexible and accommodating. Rabbani had created obstacles earlier in the week when he insisted that key decisions could not be made in Bonn but must be ratified in Kabul, and he had made it clear that he did not want a large international peace-keeping force. His younger Northern Alliance colleagues appeared ready to ratify agreements in Bonn, insisted that Rabbani would not be imposed as President, and were open to negotiations, while many major foreign leaders called Rabbani, begging and threatening him not to create obstacles to a peace agreement. On December 2, however, he floated “new ideas on Afghan future” that were certain to cause controversy. Rabbani suggested, among other things, that Omar, Bin Laden, and top Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders not be handed over to the U.S. for trial, but that they should be tried in Afghanistan (Washington Post (Dec. 3, 2001). Obviously, a major split was in the making within the Northern Alliance and its differences with other Afghan ethnic and tribal groupings created an incredibly complex situation.
On December 4, the hopeful news circulated that the conference in Bonn had reached provisional consensus concerning a new government in Afghanistan with Pashtun leader, and U.S. ally, Hamid Karzai appointed to be provisional leader. But latter that day it was reported that the U.S. “friendly fire” near Kandahar had killed three U.S. servicement, wounded 19, as well as killing five members of the southern anti-Taliban opposition forces and wounding several others, including the new head on an interim Afghanistan administration Hamid Karzai! Evidently, a satellite-directed U.S. missile went astray when U.S. ground troops were working with anti-Taliban Afghan units to help capture Kandahar.
Fortunately, Karzai was only lightly wounded, for the next day it was announced that Taliban leader Mullah Omar had agreed to “surrender Kandahar,” to hand-over weapons, and thus to admit to defeat. A murky deal was made between Omar and Karzai that would allow Omar to surrender and live “in dignity.” In Karzai’s version, if Omar renounced terrorism and agreed to give up Osama Bin Laden he could receive amnesty. The feisty Donald Rumsfeld, U.S. Secretary of Defense, however, would have none of this and barely contained his anger when he blurted out that if any of "those people” gave Omar or other Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders amnesty, U.S. “cooperation and assistance” would “take a turn to the South.”
Conflict between Rumsfeld and Karzai was not to unfold, however, as Taliban troops fled Kandahar with their weapons the night before the announced Friday surrender. Mullah Omar, himself, who had repeatedly called upon his followers to fight to the death, quickly disappeared, without renouncing terrorism, enabling Karzai to declare that Omar was “a fugitive from justice” and “I want to arrest him.”
With the collapse of the Taliban regime, Kandahar erupted into chaos. Opposing factions of the anti-Taliban forces entered the city and fought to take control of arms and institutions. Looting was wide-spread and there were few reports of celebration as shell-shocked residents coped with their new situation. U.S. soldiers tried to patrol roads leading out of Kandahar and reportedly attacked one Taliban convoy, killing seven, but no one knows how many Taliban and their foreigner Islamic supporters successfully fled the city, and there were incriminations that “it was worse than careless to let the terrorists slip away” (The Times, Dec. 8, 2001).
On the other hand, as pictures of the roads from Kandahar to the Pakistan border showed when television crews were allowed to enter the city, many vehicles and individuals fleeing the city had been bombed or shot. The road was littered with ruins of tanks, trucks, animals, and human bodies and so obviously many Taliban or Islamic fighters had been slaughtered on the flight from Kandahar.
The interim President Karzai called upon Afghans to hunt for Bin Laden and tribal groups organized forces to storm the caves where he was believed to be hiding in the Tora Bora area. The U.S. intensified bombing around the caves. There were claims that Bin Laden was seen riding around on horseback in the area, and another on December 8 that Mullah Omar was “captured,” though this turned out to be untrue. Donald Rumsfeld, U.S. Secretary of Defense, declared that the war was far from over, that the new situation was fraught with dangers, that the U.S. intervention was entering a complex and dangerous stage.
There were also dangers of mass starvation of Afghan refugees and victims of the postwar anarchy. At a conference on donor aid to Afghanistan in Bonn on December 9, UN representatives and the German foreign Minister Joschka Fischer noted that postwar chaos and famine threaten millions, pleading for international aid efforts and stability. The Bush administration had still not announced any step-up in humanitarian missions and there were broad hints that the U.S. mission was largely military and that others would have to take responsibility for stabilizing Afghanistan and providing humanitarian relief. Colin Powell did manage, however, to open the bridge from Uzbekistan to Afghanistan and trucks start to bring badly needed food and clothing into the northern part of the country. But the focus of the U.S. military effort was on catching Osama Bin Laden himself.
Attention now focused on the caves of Tora Bora where Bin Laden was believed by some to be hiding. Local villagers reported seeing him riding on horseback in recent days and the U.S. military said that they believed he was in the vicinity. The U.S. organized three groups of local tribal militia to hunt for Bin Laden and the Al Qaeda leadership in the caves, and they were accompanied by unspecified members of U.S. and British Special Forces.
The first efforts of local Arab armed forces to flush out Al Qaeda from the caves were not encouraging. Perhaps one thousand or more well-armed and organized Al Qaeda fighters in the area suppressed the first attempts by the barely trained local militia to assault the mountain fortresses. Over the weekend of December 8-9 U.S. bombing of the White Mountains intensied and the roughly 2,500 Afghan fighters continued their attempts to assault the stronghold but their six day campaign had made little headway in the face of heavy resistance. Moreover, the Washington Post reported that Over the weekend, a U.S. bomb took the lives of three Afghan attackers, “bringing to 20 the number of Afghan attackers killed by the United States near Tora Bora. ‘We’re very angry,’ [one of the local militia leaders] Zaman said” (Dec. 10, 2001).
In southern Afghanistan, U.S. “hunter killer teams” roamed the Kandahar area looking for Al Qaeda fighters or recalcitrant Taliban. U.S. forces fought one band of retreating pro-Taliban Arabs, reportedly killing seven, and moved into the outskirts of the city. U.S. Special Forces accompanied Afghans to Mullah Omar’s former headquarters that revealed what some Afghans saw as “opulence,” marveling over (and pinching) its luxury items. But most Western reporters described it as rather tacky with its pink-tiled toilets, golden chandeliers, gaudy murals, brightly colored mosque, and rather large living quarters, replete with stables and grounds for horses and camels. Omar himself was in hiding with a $10 million bounty on his head.
The Kandahar area remained dangerous and no aid organizations were able to get access to the city. The interim President Hamid Karzai received visitors in Omar’s former palace, but as soon as he left for Kabul, gunshots were reported throughout the city and it remained a site of danger and intrigue. On December 13, U.S. forces drove into the city and secured the airport, but unspecified threats of attack put them on high alert and postponed efforts to begin using the airport for flights.
Focus of world attention, however, was on Tora Bora. On December 11, the U.S. dropped a 15,000 pound “Daisy cutter” bomb on the entrance of a cave in an effort to flush out or kill senior Al Qaeda leadership. The Arab and Al Qaeda fighters had been subjected to days of bombing and were reportedly ready for surrender. According to The Times, as of December 11, “the eight-day bombardment” was “equivalent to all the explosives dropped on Dresden in 1945. It seems that Tora Bora took about a third of all the American explosives dropped on Afghanistan in the past two months.”
The rag-tag Afghan forces, now referred to as the “eastern alliance,” were able to take over an Al Qaeda training camp and some of their caves after the heavy U.S. bombing, as the Bin Laden forces scurried out, moving higher into the mountains. The caves themselves appeared in the TV and photo images as rather barren and not the opulent and modern headquarters sketched out in simulacra of the caves which had appeared in newspapers and TV. There were reports that one of the three Afghan leaders of the militia assault forces had negotiated a surrender for the Al Qaeda/Arab fighters, but the U.S. rejected terms of surrender and continued to bomb the caves. This angered the faction of the Afghan militia forces attempting to negotiate the surrender, who complained that the U.S. scuttled the surrender deal, a claim that the Pentagon rejected. However, other competing Afghan militia groups insisted that the negotiated cease-fire and purported surrender were ploys to help provide time for the Bin Laden forces to regroup or to escape to Pakistan.
There were indeed rumors on December 12 that Bin Laden himself had escaped, according to Abu Jaffer, a Bin Laden associate from Saudi Arabia who said that the Al Qaeda leader had fled to Pakistan ten days ago (Christian Science Monitor). U.S. military officials, nonetheless, continued to affirm reports that Bin Laden was still holed-up in the Tora Bora mountain fortress. The major event of the week, however, was the release of a home video-tape of Bin Laden and associates laughing about and celebrating the September 11 terror attacks on the U.S. A video had been found in a house in Jalalabad that recorded Bin Laden, a Saudi sheik visiting the area, and various associates reminiscing about the success of the September 11 attacks. It was presented by the Bush administration and media as a “smoking gun” in which Bin Laden claimed responsibility for the attacks, pre-knowledge of them, and joy in what he saw as their success. Yet, even before the tapes were released, skeptics claimed that a good lawyer could argue that Bin Laden might be merely bragging and might be illicitly claiming responsibility, so that the legal status of the tape was unclear.
The history of the Bin Laden tapes was somewhat murky. Evidently, anti-Taliban Afghans found the tape in a house in Jalalabad in November, after Taliban forces fled the area. They were shown to Bush and others in his administration in late November, and came to the publics’ attention on December 8 when a story leaked to the Washington Post mentioned their existence and significance. The next day, Vice-President Cheney admitted their existence on a talk show and said that the Bush administration had not decided whether to release them or not. There were then reports early in the week that they would be released, but that their release was being delayed to ensure accurate translation. The story surely generated intense media interest, but also some skepticism as to why the Bush administration had delayed release of the tapes so long and in so circuitous a fashion.
Some argued that the Bin Laden tapes might have tremendous propaganda value as an antidote to those in the Middle East and elsewhere who continued to believe that Bin Laden was innocent and was being scapegoated for the attacks. The tapes also reportedly made Bin Laden look extremely callous and cynical and would create a bad image of him in the Arab world. In preparation for the release of the tapes, first Dick Cheney and then various other officials who were shown the tapes claimed that they revealed how cruel and callous Bin Laden was, who was allegedly shown gloating over the deaths on September 11. The most extravagant response was that of George W. Bush who claimed: “For those who see this tape, they’ll realize that not only is he guilty of incredible murder, he has no conscience and no soul - that he represents the worst of civilization.”
The soulgazer Bush looked into Russian President Putin’s eyes and saw his soul and behold Putin’s a soulman; Bush stared into Bin Laden’s evasive eyes and perceived that he has no soul. This soulgazing ability assumes that Bush himself has a soul somewhere in the cauldron of greed, guilt, anxiety, aggression, pettiness, spite, confusion, and emptiness that constitutes his own subjectivity. Yet, Bush seemed to have forgotten that, according to his own catechism, Bin Laden represents the antithesis rather than “just the worst of civilization.”
The tape itself was released on December 13 and dominated the television networks and buzz of the day. The Bush administration cleverly held the tape several days, to assure accurate translation, but also to build up anticipation. The story also pushed off the news agenda reports that Bush had the previous day pulled out of the anti-ballistic missile treaty, a move that Russian leader Putin called a “mistake,” and that had the Chinese and others up in arms and ready for a missile race. Moreover, Bush had invoked “executive privilege” to keep Congress from seeing a wide range of prosecutors’ decision making, leading conservative Republican Congressman Phil Burton to complain, “This is not a monarchy.” No Phil, it’s just a democracy being flushed down the tubes with the media broadcasting the spectacle of the day to cover over the relentless attack on democracy and seizure of presidential power by the Bush administration under the cover of terror war.[58]
The Bin Laden tape was fascinating and revealing, disclosing intimate details of the September 11 terror acts, delight in the results, and belief that the attacks were sanctioned by God and evidenced God’s blessing. The discussion revealed the geopolitical sweep of Al Qaeda with strong support in the Islamic world, and fanatic religious ideology that permeated their every reference. The historical and religious references made clear that the Saudi Wahhabi religion provided the ideological basis of Al Qaeda. The conversation was replete with mention of dreams, visions, and omens of the September 11 terror attacks, as if they were a mandate of God and in line with Islam folk mythology. The discourse showed the premodern interpretation of Islam that permeated the Al Qaeda mindset. It combined references from the Koran, Islamic poetry, and folk sayings with discussions of the great joy and power of the September 11 terror attacks, that allegedly was creating a great surge of interest and conversion to Islam in Holland and elsewhere, claims not supported by empirical evidence showing the propensity to elevate fantasy over fact in the Bin Laden circle.
One chilling exchange, however, compared Muslims’ joy in the killings to sports events, as when one is excited about the victory and success of one’s team. The Saudi sheik effervesced with enthusiasm to Bin Laden about the cheers and exultation felt by the Saudi followers of Team Jihad when they viewed pictures of the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.
Moreover, the tape showed the deep complicity of Saudi Arabia in Al Qaeda and financial, organizational and personal support of Bin Laden in his adopted country. The Saudi sheik whom Bin Laden was speaking with, and who dominated the conversation, was later identified as were several mullahs referred to in the banter. Bin Laden seemed extremely anxious to hear about Saudi support for his terror acts and extremely pleased to hear of his backing in a number of mosques and that Saudi Arabians were generally ecstatic about the results of the terror attacks and regarded Bin Laden a national hero.
One wonders if the deep interconnection between Bin Laden, Saudi Arabia, the September 11 events and the Bush family will ever come to light and how the public will view the close relationships between the Saudis and the Bushes and their business partners. If the Bush doctrine was logically applied, the U.S. would be forced to go after Saudi Arabia, obviously the country that most markedly produced, financed, and supported the Al Qaeda network, supplying 15 of the 19 terrorists as well as Bin Laden and other top Al Qaeda leadership.
Acknowledging the crucial role of Saudi Arabia in global terrorism, however, would force the Bush administration to go against a country that Bush’s family and friends had long been deeply implicated in themselves. Revealing aspects of the Saudi Arabia and Bush group connections were spelled out in some articles published in the Boston Herald on December 10 and 11, 2001. The articles recounted that Saudi Arabia had refused to let the U.S. use Saudi bases for the military operations in Afghanistan; had balked at freezing of assets linked to Bin Laden; and had provided many of the foot soldiers who had taken part in the September 11 terrorist attacks. The commentaries document the ways that the Bush family, Cheney, and other major Bush administration supporters have been themselves involved with Saudi oil business, arms sales, construction projects, and other business deals, suggesting a tight interconnection between the Bush administration and Saudi Arabia. The conclusion is that tight connections between the Saudis and Bush administration officials and supporters have helped produce the anger and rage in the Arab world that has promoted terrorism against the U.S. and that although the Bush administration arguably had leverage with their Saudi friends to fight terrorism, they seemed not to utilize it.
As for the so-called Arab street, it was not impressed with the Bin Laden video, believing that the tape was a fraud. Qatar’s Al Jazeera television had commentators on who immediately insisted that the “tape has been fabricated, it’s not real.” The father of condemned terrorist Mohammed Atta dismissed the tape as a “forgery” to an Associated Press journalist. Obviously, some Arabs were so bound to belief in Bin Laden that they could not recognize the cynicism and viciousness in his distortion of Islam, while others so distrusted and hated the U.S. that it was unlikely they would believe anything released by the Great Satan. Moreover, BBC reported that not only did many Arabs question the authenticity of the tape, but they were angry at the timing of release:
Some Saudis questioned whether the man on the tape really is Bin Laden.
They say he is not thin enough, that he is a different person from the gaunt, turbanned figure who released his own videotaped messages a few weeks ago.
In Cairo, some Egyptian Islamists are suggesting that the US government has spent the last few days concocting the tape to fool the world.
But in London, a leading Saudi dissident, who asked not to be named, told the BBC he was sure the tape was genuine because of the language used and topics discussed.
Unfortunate timing
However, he said the tape's release would only increase popular Arab support for Bin Laden, proving, he said, that he had the power to hurt America.
The timing of the tape's release is certainly unfortunate for Washington, coming as it does amidst massive Israeli retaliation against the Palestinians.
The tape's potential effect, therefore, is largely lost on an angry Arab public.
Even though many moderate Arabs may now be convinced of Bin Laden's guilt, their attentions are more focused on the misfortunes of the Palestinians today than on what happened in New York three months ago (Dec. 13, 2001).
Many Arab newspapers downplayed or ignored the Bin Laden tape and many Arab TV viewers complained that they could not understand the Arabic, especially Bin Laden whose voice was muffled during the recording and whose mouth was often shrouded in darkness, making it difficult to see his lips, thus encouraging speculation that his voice was at least partially dubbed. Sensing Arab frustration with the poor sound, and seemingly shocked by the largely negative Arab response, the Bush administration PR bumblers decided to release the videotape again, this time with Arabic subtitles as if Washington’s translators were going to change Arab hearts and minds about the Terror War.
The U.S. response to the Bin Laden tape was, not surprisingly, ferocious. Large segments of the public were visibly angered, called for Bin Laden’s head, and came to demonize the demon of terror even more. Bin Laden’s gloating and laughing over the September 11 deaths curdled the blood of many in the U.S. audience and evoked copious calls for retribution. This response, of course, raises the stakes in actually capturing and/or killing Bin Laden to claim success in the Terror War. Bin Laden emerged clearly as the number one figure in global terrorism, a sworn enemy of the U.S. with a network of support and adulation. If he was not brought to justice, the campaign could be deemed a failure, or at least closure would not really have been achieved.
Although George W. Bush blustered on December 14 that it was “preposterous” that anyone could doubt the authenticity of the Bin Laden tape, in fact there were fierce debates over its production, meaning, and mode of release, demonstrating acute hermeneutical capacities of audiences and critics through the world, and vindicating the position long argued by British cultural studies that different audiences produce different interpretations of the text. Special effects experts in London “say [that a] fake would be relatively easy to make” (Guardian, Dec. 15, 2001). But experts in the U.S. from Bell Labs and MIT concluded: “technology not yet good enough to fake Bin Laden tape” (AP, Dec. 15, 2001).
The response to the tape confirmed French theorist Jean Baudrillard’s position that we are currently living in an era of simulation in which it is impossible to tell the difference between the real and a fake, reality and simulation. As Hollywood films use more and more computerized scenes, as rock stars like Michael Jackson digitally “cleanse” their image, wiping away sweat from a vigorous performance and making himself more black to blend in with his brothers on stage, and as politicians use political image production and spectacle to sell themselves, the difference between the authentic and the real is harder and harder to determine. Is George W. Bush a real president, or is he just acting out the sound-bites fed him by his handlers, performing a scripted daily political act that he does not fully understand? Are the frequent warnings of terrorist attacks genuine, or just a ploy to keep the public on edge to accept more reactionary rightwing law and order politics? Is the terrorist threat as dire as the National Security State claims or are they hyping threats to raise their budgets and power? In an era of simulation, it is impossible to clearly answer these questions as we do not have access to the “real,” which in any case is complex, overdetermined, intricately constructed, and in some cases, as Kant discerned in his distinction between phenomenon and noumenon, ultimately impossible to specify.
Yet the hermeneutical challenge, that I am undertaking in these studies, is to capture as much of the reality and meaning of the September 11 events and subsequent Terror War as is possible. Many others are participating in this project. Indeed, there was close scrutiny of every word and image of the Bin Laden video, with some claiming that Bin Laden had never worn a ring such as was present on his finger, supposedly unusual for him and Islamists in general. Other Islamic experts said that the words, images, sequence, and nature of the tape had the ring of veracity, ensuring that the tape would be the most closely scrutinized and interpreted text in media history.
As indeed it was. An article in the Observer by Ed Vulliamy and Jason Burke claimed “Bin Laden videotape was result of a sting” (Dec. 16, 2001). “Intelligence sources” confirmed to the reporters that “curious circumstances” surrounded the Saudi Sheik who was receiving Bin Laden and there was speculation that he was part of a sting operation that set Bin Laden up to make the confession on video, playing on his egotism and narcissism. Others wondered why the circumspect Bin Laden would allow a tape to be made of what was seen as a confession, whereas others speculated that the cunning Bin Laden left the tape behind purposively to construct a legacy that would encourage others to follow his example. And legal experts concluded that release of the Bin Laden video would help Al Qaeda defense team, who could cite the tape, indicating that Bin Laden had said that the “martyrdom” teams had no information as to their task until the last minute, thus helping to provide a defense to terrorists, rendering release of the tapes highly problematic in the final analysis (The Times, Dec. 16, 2001).
On December 14, the night of the release of the Bin Laden tape, the Pentagon told CNN that they now believed that they had Bin Laden and his Al Qaeda forces surrounded in the Tora Bora mountain fortresses. The three groups of eastern Afghan fighters were advancing up the mountain where the Al Qaeda forces were believed to be sequestered, accompanied by U.S. and British Special Forces. Resistance from the Al Qaeda fighters was fierce, leading the Pentagon to conclude that they were protecting “something valuable,” perhaps Bin Laden. The possibility of capturing or destroying Al Qaeda leadership led to intensified U.S. bombing, the sending of more U.S. troops to the scene, and attempts to block exit roads from the mountains to neighboring Pakistan. There was some pressure to get Bin Laden before the weekend, as a three day festival of Eid, that ends Ramadan, the Muslim Holy month, was about to begin and there was belief that the Arab militia fighting Al Qaeda would go home for the weekend. It was also turning cold and had snowed, making military operations more complex.
The Afghan tribal soldiers were also complaining again, claiming that: “the American bombs disturbed our negotiations.” A Los Angeles Times report indicated that as Afghan tribal leaders squabbled about whether they should or should not negotiate with Al Qaeda fighters, “the cold and hungary soldiers had grown disgruntled and abandoned their posts. Late that night, Al Qaeda fighters swarmed forward to seize back crucial stretches of the Milawa Valley. Tribal soldiers were still battling to regain the area Thursday” (Dec. 14, 2001: A14).
On the weekend of December 14-15, stories continued to circulate of fierce fighting in Tora Bora, the retreat and surrender of Al Qaeda troops, and of speculation as to whether Bin Laden was or was not in the mountain fortresses being attacked. U.S. troops were reportedly heavily involved in the fighting, bombing was intense, and there were reports of some U.S. troops wounded in battle. One eastern Afghan leader complained that he was negotiating with Al Qaeda troops demanding unconditional surrender, but “he doubted the United States would accept any deal with Al Qaeda. ‘In my opinion,” he said, “the Americans want to kill them” (Washington Post, Dec. 15, 2001).
The main story of the weekend, however, was that Pentagon officials had leaked to CNN that they had tapes which suggested that Bin Laden himself was in the caves directing the military operations. Expectations of Bin Laden’s imminent capture thus intensified, although some military analysts told CNN that it was standard operating procedure to use tapes to confuse the enemy during retreat. The haunting specter of the inability to determine between reality and simulation in speculation that the supposed Bin Laden voice could have been from an audiotape used to deflect attention from the flight of Al Qaeda fighters from the caves into Pakistan. Indeed, there were reports that hundreds had left for Pakistan and that 61 fleeing Al Qaeda fighters had been captured by the Pakistan border patrol. A UPI filing by Amaud de Borchgrave, however, suggested that the Pakistan border was highly porous, that hundreds of Al Qaeda troops had escaped and that the local tribes were largely sympathetic to them (Dec. 14, 2001). There was, of course, speculation that Bin Laden himself had already escaped in this fashion, and in a Washington Post interview Donald Rumsfeld, U.S. Secretary of Defense, confessed that there are “hundreds” of tunnels from the caves in Afghanistan to Pakistan, thus creating many possible escape routes.
The Tora Bora Al Qaeda forces, however, seemed to be crumbling and there were reports on December 16 that hundreds had fled, many had been captured, and scores had been killed. There were reportedly few troops left in the caves after sixteen days of intense bombing and intermittent heavy fighting. A Washington Post story by Molly Moore and Susan B. Glasser surprisingly revealed that the remaining Al Qaeda fighters had a sense of humor (Dec. 16, 2001):
The radio traffic also offered a glimpse of the confusion surrounding the final hunt for the bin Laden loyalists, as Afghan fighters cautiously advanced toward remaining al Qaeda positions, anxiously called off U.S. warplanes and searched in vain for enemies they fear might have already fled to Pakistan.
Some of the voices over the radio were plaintive, some eager, some humorous. "The weather is very cold," one Afghan fighter radioed this morning. "Tell the Americans to continue the bombardment. I cannot fire."
After reporting the presence of only a few al Qaeda fighters, he joked: "Tell the Americans to use gas to finish them. . . . I'm very cold."
By December 17, it was clear that the Al Qaeda fighters in Tora Bora had been soundly routed, that many were killed, some were captured, and many more escaped. The Eastern Alliance claimed victory over Al Qaeda, admitted they had no idea where Bin Laden was, and begged the U.S. to stop bombing, claiming that they night before three of its fighters were killed by U.S. bombs. When queried by reporters in the Pentagon where Bin Laden might be, Rear Adm John D. Stufflebeem remarked that the hunt was “like searching for fleas on a dog. If you see one and you focus on that one, you don’t know how many others are getting away.” The racist Admiral was referring to Afghanistan as a dog with fleas, reducing Arabs to animals, much as the U.S. military had done in the Iraqi “turkey shoot” that they bragged out at the end of the Gulf War.
The U.S. military admitted that there was no more electronic “chatter” from cave communications, and the “Eastern Alliance” was searching the caves, finding old weapons and wretched living conditions. But, crucially, for the U.S., it appeared that Bin Laden had escaped, perhaps to Pakistan where it would be tricky to dislodge him. The forlorn Afghan and Al Qaeda fighters captured in the battle for Tora Bora appeared utterly shell-shocked and pathetic, as they pleaded with the Afghans not to turn them over to the U.S., and as they were paraded in front of the world media.
As the hunt for Bin Laden escalated, all hell broke loose in the Middle East as the Israelis and Palestinians continued to wage terror war against each other. After the Palestinian terror attacks of December 2, the Israelis struck back with a series of strikes on Palestinian targets, with one missile going astray on December 12 and killing two Palestinian children. Palestinians retaliated once again with an attack that killed ten Israelis living in the Gaza settlements, and on December 13 Israel broke off contact with Yassar Arafat and announced a stepped-up military campaign to arrest Palestinian militants and confiscate weapons. Israel then showered Palestinian territories with missiles, tank assaults, and military attacks.
It was now perfectly clear that one of the consequences of the Bush doctrine, which proclaimed the right of a country hit by terror to go after the government of the country where the terrorists lived and were presumably “supported.” This barbaric “doctrine” could be used to justify war against “terrorists” anywhere in the world, any time that a government wanted to strike out at enemies. The Bush doctrine thus effectively provided carte blanche for military retaliation in which the law of the jungle would replace international law, diplomacy, and negotiation. As the new millennium unfolded, centuries of diplomatic progress were put aside as the New Barbarians took the world into the emergent and dangerous space of Operation Enduring Terror War.
The Bin Laden terror network and Bush administration response arguably represent societal regression on a massive historical scale. Deploying the weapons of terror and war instead of diplomacy and legality, Bin Laden and the Bush administration put force before negotiation and barbarism before civilization, unleashing an era of unrestrained militarism, terror, and aggression.
While Bin Laden has emerged as a figurehead for radical Islamic fundamentalism and terror, George W. Bush has emerged as a figurehead for unrestrained military action, conservative economic policies, assaults on civil liberties and the open society, and aggressive assertion of U.S. power politics. Throughout the Afghan campaign, the U.S. had subordinated humanitarian issues to military ones, generating tensions with their closest ally Great Britain, as I note below. In effect, the Bush administration was carrying out a primarily unilateral military campaign, using cluster bombs, killing thousands of civilians, driving hundreds of thousands of Afghan people from their homes with no effort to provide humanitarian shelter or protection of the innocents.[59] The U.S. had also failed to provide adequate prisoner-of-war facilities for surrendering Al Qaeda troops, leading the U.S. to participate in, or observe, massacres of hundreds of surrendered troops, events that could be construed as war crimes. But such was the barbarism and war hysteria that the major U.S. television networks solely celebrated the military victories, without dwelling on the “collateral damage.” A new barbarism had become fashionable, with Donald Rumsfeld, U.S. Secretary of Defense, and other tough-guy military spokespeople becoming national celebrities, while armchair pundits outfrothed each other in efforts to appear properly tough and martial.
Another negative consequence came to the fore from Bush Barbarism as the noose tightened around the necks of Bin Laden and the Al Qaeda leadership. UK Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon announced that Britain opposed the execution of Osama Bin Laden and that international law dictated that he be given a fair trial, an explicit slam at Bush administration which was a stronger supporter of the death penalty and was calling for secret military tribunals. As John Ashcroft, U.S. Attorney General, traveled to Europe, many Europeans were angry that Ashcroft was urging them to drop their objections to the death penalty in favor of giving the U.S. an unrestrained hand in carrying out trials and executions as they saw fit. Under the guise of fighting terrorism, the Bush administration was thus pushing its barbaric efforts to legitimate capital punishment and promote highly anti-democratic legal policies.
On December 17, while defusing mines at the Kandahar airport, one U.S. Marine had his foot blown off and two others were injured. This called attention to the barbarism of landmines, which saturated Afghanistan after twenty years of war. It also highlighted the savagery and barbarism of Bush administration opposition to the land mine treaty, that much of the world had endorsed. Landmines are an utterly barbaric instrument that are highly anti-civilian, as they are often buried and hidden and sometimes only explode many years later. There is no excuse in a civilized world to continue this barbaric technology and it should be eliminated immediately. Afghanistan, for example, had from 640,000 to twenty million unexploded landmines, with an average of 88 mine casualties per month, according to the Halo Trust, a British organization that has been destroying landmines and unexploded munitions in Afghanistan since 1988.[60]
A revealing British speech given on December 11, generally ignored by U.S. media, was also significant. Admiral Sir Michael Boyce, Chief of the Defence Staff, cited a significant divergence between Britain and the U.S. in the prosecution of the Afghan campaign. As I have noted, while the U.S. wanted to focus primarily on military aims, Britain was eager to carry out humanitarian aims, to put in place peace-keeping troops to maintain order and to enable food and other necessities to be delivered. For some weeks, the U.S. had rebuffed British demands to get on with the humanitarian program and Boyce reflected growing British impatience, stating: “We have to consider whether we wish to follow the U.S.’s single-minded aim to finish Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda Š or to involve ourselves in creating the conditions for nation-building or reconstruction as well” (The Times, Dec. 13, 2001).
As if to confirm the wisdom of British calls for immediate peace-keeping forces in Afghanistan and the folly of the Bush administration resistence to them, there were reports that “unpaid soldiers spark crimewave in Kabul” (Guardian, Dec. 15, 2001). Evidently, unpaid and desperate Northern Alliance soldiers were looting wealthier Kabul neighborhoods and even killing people who resisted their robberies. The Northern Alliance troops complained, in turn, of not being paid for months and not being able to afford life in Kabul, calling attention to the immediate need for an international brigade of peace-keeping troops throughout Afghanistan and stepped up humanitarian aid efforts.
While U.S. media and the Bush administration were gloating over their military successes in Afghanistan, many critics indicated that until Bin Laden, Mullah Omar, and top Taliban and Al Qaeda leadership were arrested or eliminated, the U.S. could not really claim victory as the stated war aims had been to go after Al Qaeda leadership and not just to overthrow the Taliban. Although most people in Afghanistan seemed to be happy to be rid of the Taliban, some critics said that people were not yet really better off, that many former Taliban and corrupt warlords had returned to power, that suffering in the country had increased as a result of the war, and that chaos and uncertainty prevailed. Others, like the British and many Europeans, were upset that the U.S. had not played a stronger role in humanitarian aid and were skeptical of U.S. commitment to Afghan reconstruction. Europeans were also becoming increasingly upset with what was obviously the unilateralist and militarist nature of Bush administration war on terror, with the U.S. going it alone as the world policeman against global terrorism, unleashing a New Barbarism and unending terror war.
Arabs were upset over the number and extent of civilian casualties in Afghanistan and the fierce attacks of Israel against Palestinians. The U.S. seemed to walk away from negotiations, as they pulled out their diplomat General Zinni and refused to publicly rebuke Israel for their daily assaults on the Palestinians. On December 15, the U.S. vetoed a UN Security Council resolution that condemned acts of terror against Israelis and Palestinians, that demanded an end to nearly 15 months of escalating violence, and that established a “monitoring mechanism” to bring in observers. Israel evidently opposed the latter condition and the U.S. thus killed an effort to bring in the UN to help produce peace, angering the Arab world and causing tension with close European allies and other civilized nations who supported the resolution. It was hard to imagine how there could be peace in the Middle East between Israel and Palestine without UN intervention as obviously conditions were spinning out of control and the Bush administration was clearly more intent on waging enduring terror war than promoting peace and security.
The U.S. Lone Ranger and Wild West approach to global terrorism was threatening to position the U.S. as the number one target for those who felt aggrieved and wretched, assuring a host of enemies and retribution for years to come. Bush’s Terror War thus unleashed an era of militarism and barbarism that would not only create an increasingly insecure and violent world, but would produce more enemies of the U.S. which resented the constant assertion of military power and blocking of serious efforts for peace and global responses and solutions to global problems like terrorism, or the Middle East conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.
Jumping into the New Barbarism, terrorists in India attacked the Parliament in the bloodiest assault on India’s democracy in its history. China executed Muslim separatists and the U.S. sent troops into the Philippines to help exterminate oppositional Islamic groups. CIA forces entered Somalia, preparing for more U.S. military attacks, and the U.S. set up support bases in Kenya for operations in Africa. In a New Yorker article “The Iraq Hawks” (Dec. 16, 2001), Seymour Hersh documented a new war plan for Iraq being developed by the Bush administration that would follow the Afghanistan model of heavy bombardment of Iraqi targets and U.S. support of oppositional groups inside and outside Iraq; critics questioned the Iraq/Afghanistan analogy and doubted that Iraqi opposition was an extensive and well-organized as Afghan opposition which easily overthrew a poorly armed and barely functional Taliban military.
In China, a bizarre act of barbarism was reported the same day claiming that a suicide bomber had entered a McDonald's in China and detonated the explosive, killing himself and wounding others; was this an act of sheer madness, of culinary critique, or an anti-globalization protest? In the U.S., a fake grenade rolled down the aisle of an American Airlines flight and caused mayhem at a San Diego airport, forcing evacuations, grounding flights and closing streets. It turns out that Lolita Austria, 57, had stolen a small shopping map belonging to an airport security screener which contained a fake grenade, used to test security. Earlier, another American barbarian closed down the Atlanta airport when he jumped over a security barricade to avoid missing a connection to a football game.
The New Barbarism was visible everyday on American television, running 24/7 on the Fox Network and dominating CNN and the NBC cable networks. The bumbling bourgeois barbarian Bill O’Reilly on his Sunday December 16 “No Spin Zone” spinfest reduced the Bin Laden tape to a litmus test as to whether you were a patriot or traitor, according to whether you believed it was a smoking gun or not that decisively proved Bin Laden’s guilt. While there were few serious doubts that Bin Laden and Al Qaeda were guilty of the September 11 bombing, the tape had its fishy elements and it was highly offensive for the simplistic O’Reilly to use any Bush administration argument as a litmus test for patriotism. Indeed, John Ashcroft, the highly barbaric U.S. Attorney General, had done the same the week before in Congressional Hearings where he argued that anyone who questioned military trials for terrorists or his barbaric anti-terrorist policies were aiding and abetting the terrorist enemy (the same tone and argument had been adopted by the most barbaric anti-communists in an earlier era of U.S. political barbarism).
Fox network, of course, was owned by Australian rightwing barbarian Rupert Murdoch and was run by the grossly barbaric Roger Ailes, a Republican spinmeister and professional liar, who was grossly overweight, crude in his manners and demeanor, coarse in his mode of thought and expression, and a perfect Poster (fat)Man for the New Barbarism. Fox pundits oozed barbarism from every pore, blaring graphics and creepy crawlers, ruling out mention of civilian casualties from news reports and bringing on an unending parade of barely literate bellicose military “analysts” who parroted the Pentagon line of the day and anti-terrorist “experts” who outdid each other with belligerence and hostility.
An ultraright media attack dog group sent out an e-mail revealing the deeply anti-democratic thrust of the New Barbarism. This e-mail is worth citing in full and pondering its implications:
From:"MediaResearchCenter"
<smalinowski@mediaresearch.org
To:xxx@xxxxxxx.xxx
Sent: Thursday, December 13, 2001 5:56 PM
Subject: MRC Needs Your Help!
December 14, 2001
DearŠXXXXXX
There's a real sense of urgency in this letter. As
you may know, the Media Research Center (MRC) has a new and vital mission. And the MRC is the only conservative media watchdog group
capable of fulfilling this new mission successfully.
We are training our guns on any media outlet
or any reporter interfering with America's war on terrorism or trying to
undermine the authority of President Bush. We are taking no prisoners! Senator Jesse Helms stated at a dinner in Washington, D.C.
last week that Afghanistan was going to be the easy part of this war on terror;
it would be the beginning, not the end! We cannot let the liberal media
distract America from its resolve. We will not let them make this another
Vietnam!
When the Reuters News Service announced they wouldn't use the term
"terrorist" to describe the horror of September 11th, because
"one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter," we made a
national issue of this disgrace.
When CNN announced it was trying to get a one-sided "interview" with
bin Laden, which would allow him to spew his anti-America hatred worldwide, we
made a national issue of it. CNN has now issued a policy whereby its reporters
are to remind the public on a regular basis about the horrors perpetrated by
bin Laden on September 11th.
When ABC News President David Westin made the incredible comment that he had
"no opinion" and was "neutral" as to whether or not the
attack on the Pentagon was an act of terrorism, we made a national issue of
this outrage and within a day he was forced to issue a public apology.
When the New York Times had a major story on how
conservatives have declared war on the media over their coverage. NYT cited the
MRC as the general behind this nationwide effort. For once, the New York Times
is right.
Just the other day, Bernard Goldberg, a former CBS News reporter for 28 years,
came out with stunning accounts of media bias from inside CBS News, which are
documented in his new book- Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort
the News. Goldberg testifies that when he confronted CBS News President Andrew
Heyward about liberal bias and its watchdogs like the Media Research Center,
Heyward quickly dismissed us as "activists and extremists of the
Right". Goldberg's book verifies everything that the MRC has been saying
for the past 14 years. In fact, Chapter 12 of Bias is based on information from
the MRC.
This is indeed a CRITICAL time for holding
the media's feet to the fire and we cannot
do it alone! We need your support TODAY!
The MRC is committed to providing you, our loyal subscribers and supporters
with the latest updates and research to keep you informed of our efforts to
expose and hold accountable the liberal media. We do this free of charge.
The Media Research Center has a budget of $5.7 million. We are committed to
using every available asset at our disposal in this campaign. But, We cannot
continue to sustain this mission without your help! So, I'm asking you, please
click onto our donation page below and rush a gift of $50, $75, $100 or even
$1000 if you can do it. It's fully tax deductible, and it can be personal or
corporate. And I ask you, please do so right away.
You know the importance of our mission. You've seen the incredible successes
we've had so far. Please help us continue our work.
Sincerely,
L.BrentBozell
President
To donate now, please click here:
The Media Research Center is hosting the 2nd
Annual Dishonors Awards Dinner roasting this years most outrageously biased
liberal reporters. For more information on how YOU can attend, please click
below:
http://www.mrc.org/bookstore/dishonors.html
Mr. Bozell and his boobish barbarian brotherhood bare their fangs and pronounce their readiness to rip-apart any liberal reporter who might question Bush administration war policy, such as the need for the cessation of bombing and military activities that threaten civilians, or the need to immediately begin humanitarian aid. Prohibitions against the mention of civilian casualties had already circulated throughout the media and there were few, if any, reports on the television networks of military misdeeds, such as the use of cluster bombs, and reports of the killing of Afghan civilians were barely visible on U.S. TV. But the Bozell Barbarians want total control of the news media by the politically correct Bush administration and Pentagon propaganda, total censorship of military news, and total conformity to the demands of ungoing and total war. Indeed, what is especially frightening in the barbaric appeal to beknighted boobs to open their check books to Bozell’s boorish wingnaut hit squads is the suggestion that anyone who questions any military activity undertaken by the Bush Barbarians is slated for termination with extreme prejudice.
Documenting the New Barbarism on a daily basis, the progressive website www.buzzflash.com released another harrowing portrait of how mobs of barbarized citizens heckled those who did not go along with the rampant militarism and attack on civil liberties of the Bush administration:
A BuzzFlash
News Alert: Newspaper Publisher Heckled for Speech About Threats to Civil
Liberties.
BuzzFlash is concerned about that state of free speech in America. When someone questions the actions of our government it is quickly labeled by many as "anti-American" and sandbagged. We don't know why this is happening -- other than some symptom of September 11th post-traumatic stress disorder -- but we wish it would stop.
Without free speech and the ability to have non-violent dissenting opinions about our government's actions and deeds, we become no better than every other repressive regime that ever inhabited our planet.
And that, indeed, is a sad thing.
Below is a report in the Sacramento Bee on the speech and the complete text of the speech by Janis Besler Heaphy, president and publisher of The Sacramento Bee.
BuzzFlash.
***********************************************************
Graduation speech cut short by hecklers
By Nancy Weaver Teichert -- Bee Staff Writer
Published 5:15 a.m. PST Sunday, Dec. 16, 2001
http://www.sacbee.com/content/news/story/1335122p-1404788c.html
The commencement address for mid-year graduates at California State University, Sacramento, was halted Saturday after audience members in the packed house at Arco Arena drowned out the speech with heckling.
Janis Besler Heaphy, president and publisher of The Sacramento Bee, was speaking before the largest crowd ever for a CSUS graduation ceremony about the threats to civil liberties posed by the federal government's investigation into the Sept. 11 attacks. Her comments were drowned out about five minutes into the eight-minute speech when a segment of the audience began to stomp and clap in protest to her words.
University President Don Gerth said he could not provide exact figures for the number of people attending Saturday's event, but said Arco Arena was packed for the ceremony, which combined the graduation rites for several schools at the university. The arena can hold more than 17,000.
"This was a message about civil liberties and our acceptance of differing points of view in American society," Heaphy said in an interview after the commencement. "It's a message that needs to continue to be heard."
During her speech, the heckling began after Heaphy voiced concerns about racial profiling, the suspension of civil rights of suspects in the Sept. 11 attacks, and the establishment of military tribunals.
Gerth said the graduating students were respectful and that the interruptions came from family members and friends in the audience. He said several students came up to Heaphy afterward to apologize.
Before Heaphy was interrupted, Gerth said, she was making a point about the potential consequences of the methods being used to investigate the terrorist attacks. He said that, in light of the many lives lost in the attacks, some members of the audience may have found the message hard to hear.
"The temper of the times is not terribly open to that," he said. "Our students have a right to hear our speaker. I have never seen behavior like this. It is a day I will never forget. I am not proud of it."
Gerth said he took the microphone and quieted the audience after the first interruption, but that Heaphy stopped speaking about three-quarters of the way through her speech after more loud heckling.
"When the university invited me to speak," Heaphy said, "I thought about what to say. I decided that the message should be one that emphasizes the need to continue to embrace the traditions of liberty that are at the core of American democracy.
"Nothing that happened today changes my mind for the need to continue to articulate those values."
Gerth concluded the ceremony by announcing that the speech will be posted Monday on the university's Web site. The Bee will publish the address on Monday's opinion page.
http://www.sacbee.com/content/news/story/1335122p-1404788c.html
Another ugly crowd scene took place on December 17 in the Cleveland Brown’s football stadium. An unpopular referee decision in a close game in the closing minutes sent off a crowd reaction where the barbarians heeved thousands of beer bottles, garbage and miscellaneous items at the referees, hitting players of both teams and other fans. The president of the team explained that most of the beer bottles were plastic and “don’t carry much of a wallop.” Besides, “I like the fact that our fans cared.” The owner of the team brushed it off, saying that “it wasn’t World War III,” thus in effect legitimating the crowds’ barbaric behavior.
At
the end of December 2001 in Australia, fires swept through New South Wales,
ringing Sydney and twelve young boys were arrested on suspicion of arson, while
BBC reported looting and showed fire-fighters whose engines and belongings had
been stolen as they fought the fire.[61]
Argentina’s economy collapsed, in part due to political corruption and incompetency
in the country and in part because of barbaric IMF requirements that required
excessive cutbacks in the state sector and social services to pack back
exorbitant interest. The destructive effects of capitalist globalization were
clear and one hoped that in the future countries would be intelligent enough to
resist the barbarism of predatory capitalism and construct states and a public
sector able to produce more prosperity and social justice.
It was also clear by the beginning of 2002 that the Terror war was being used to justify repression of a variety of types. In an article “U.N. Fears Abuse of Terror Mandate,” William Orme notes how “the anti-terrorism campaign has been used by authoritarian governments to justify moves to clamp down on moderate opoonents, outlaw criticism of rulers and expand the use of capital punishment” (Los Angeles Times, Jan. 2, 2001). Orme notes how UN officials and human rights advocates were becoming increasingly concerned that the war on terror was legitimating both military aggression and domestic repression on a frightening scale. In a joint letter to Bush, for instance, “eight leading American human rights groups said his order authorizing the tribunals which could impose the death penalty - will be cited by foreign dictators for ‘decades to come’ as a justification for summary executions.”
The Guardian presented a revealing portrait of the New Barbarism in an article by Julian Borger, “Washington hawks get power boost” (Dec. 17, 2001). It reported on a recent dinner at an expensive Washington hotel to officially honor the “Keepers of the Fame” “U.S. security officials deemed by their more conservative colleagues to have fought the good fight for bigger defence budgets and tougher policies.” Frank Gaffney, who I cited earlier for creating derision from a Canadian audience as he suggested expanding the Terror War to every Arab country imaginable and their “sponsors” in China and Russia, declared at the barbarian fest: "’It's taken us 13 years to get here, but we've arrived,’" the evening's host, Frank Gaffney, the head of a hawkish Washington thinktank, declared to applause and murmurs of agreement.” The celebration marked the victory of hawks Donald Rumsfeld, U.S. Secretary of Defense, and his wolfish deputy Paul Wolfowitz, over Colin Powell's multilateralist approach to foreign policy and the secretary of state's “attempts to keep negotiations going with Moscow over missile defence was [which] abruptly brought to an end last week with the announcement that the United States would withdraw from the anti ballistic missile (ABM) treaty.” The New Barbarians “are capturing key squares on the chessboard of Washington power, at the expense of the moderates at state” and “almost certain to win its battle to pursue the war of terrorism into Iraq and suspected terrorist havens across the world.” Providing a useful catalogue of the New Barbarians who were taking over the Bush administration and leading the world into an era of unending Terror War, the Guardian listed:
America's top sabre-rattlers
Donald Rumsfeld - A veteran of the cold war chosen by the vice-president, Dick Cheney, in the face of opposition from Colin Powell, now secretary of state. His radical policies and abrasive manner initially provoked resistance from the Pentagon generals. But the war on terrorism has made him the most powerful member of the cabinet and he is expanding his influence into foreign policy fields normally managed by the secretary of state.
Paul Wolfowitz - Mr Rumsfeld's deputy, and the foremost exponent of a new war against Saddam Hussein. He is a former academic with a wide-ranging network of travellers and sympathisers, commonly referred to in Washington as the "Wolfowitz cabal".
Doug Feith - The Pentagon's policy supremo and a former director of the Centre for Security Policy (CSP), who has led the charge for a more pro-Israel Middle East policy.
Frank Gaffney - a former defence policy official and Rumsfeld acolyte who now runs the CSP - a thinktank and ideological seminary for young hawks. He advocates the scrapping of the Oslo peace process, the forceful promotion of the national missile defence system, and a settling of scores with Baghdad.
Richard Perle - Known as Ronald Reagan's "prince of darkness" for his distaste for disarmament treaties, and his hawkish attitude towards the Soviet Union. Mr Perle retains an important role in the defence policy board, a Pentagon thinktank which he chairs.
John Bolton - The hawks' man inside the state department. Despite the objections of Colin Powell, he was appointed undersecretary of state for arms control, non-proliferation and international security, even though he is a committed unilateralist who opposes global arms treaties on principle.
Zalmay Khalilzad - the top Afghan-American in the administration. Three years ago, he signed a joint letter with Donald Rumsfeld and other hawks, calling on the Clinton administration to topple Saddam.
He is seeking to take over the Middle East portfolio when Bruce Reidel steps down later this month.
Not much had been heard recently from Barbarian-Behind-the-Throne Dick Cheney who had reportedly been hiding in his cave while Osama seemed to have been fleeing his cave. The Guardian, however, published a news brief “Cheney shows himself for cash” (Dec. 17, 2001). The entry claims that the barbaric big Dick Cheney “has been quietly out and about raising $500,000 in Texas and Oklahoma for Republican congressional candidates,” no doubt so that the Repugs can front more barbaric boosters for the Barons of Oil that Cheney so blatantly represents. Speaking of oil, The Times of London was one of the few to point out that Donald Rumsfeld’s visit to Azerbaijan, George and Armenia over the weekend, and renewed military aid and cutback of sanctions for previous ill deeds, ended an “economic embargo [that] has hindered U.S. oil companies from developing Caspian Sea fields, which they now have encouragement from Washington to try to do” (Dec. 17, 2001).
Dialectical thought makes the connections and exploring oil and politics will reveal that Dick Cheney, the Bush family, James Baker and their friends had long cultivated connections with Caspian Sea oil exploration and the countries in the area that allegedly had oil reserves greater than Saudi Arabia. The New Barbarism is thus in a sense a front for good old greed and desire to exploit and control oil supplies and markets. It intersects with interests of the Military-Industrial-Propaganda Complex to expand and assert U.S. geopolitical domination, as well as to promote Carlyle Fund stocks held by the Bush family and their friends in the defense industries. And New Barbarism and Terror War help the Bush administration keep the public in a state of frenzy to create conditions in which it can ram its hardright policies down their throat and further its attempts to undo centuries of American democracy.
Terror War in Afghanistan could thus be the opening salvo of the New Barbarism, enabling George W. Bush and the Bush administration to militarize U.S. society, embark on endless military adventures, hysterize the public, and use the war fever to carry out their hardright agenda, stealing wealth for the corporate sectors that fund their campaigns and of which they are a part. Of course, wars need protagonists, and Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda provided the perfect villains, the embodiment of “evil,” with Saddam Hussein and other latent villains to be constructed to legitimate the next stages of Terror War as the Bush Barbarians plot their enduring wars.
Yet, in some ways, Terror War wasn’t a war at all in a conventional sense with well-defined enemies, territories, and goals. Eradicating evil from the world as George W. Bush had proclaimed at the beginning of his era of military adventure and the New Barbarism was a dangerous fantasy and would only in the end promote what it was supposed to eliminate. But the Terror War was highly useful for the Bush-Cheney gang who could exploit the crimes of terrorism to deflect attention from their own corporate and political crimes and those of their friends such as the Enron corporation whose scandalous collapse was beginning to get media attention and would get much more, as I note in later discussions of what became one of the defining stories of the era. Manipulating public hysteria, inflamed by a virulent media, the public was ready for the next assault on terrorism, and was a willing spectator of the New Barbarism that the media presented as a daily spectacle.
On December 18, Afghan forces indicated that they had located Mullah Omar in a mountain hideout in southern Afghanistan with 500 fighters and planned to attack “and lynch him” (Guardian, Dec. 18, 2001). Unable to get Bin Laden, Terror War needed another high-profile target. Yet the Afghan forces who claimed that they knew where Omar was hiding seemed reluctant to go after him, maintaining that they first needed to provide security for the city of Kandahar, still subject to acts of violence and full of one-time Taliban and perhaps Al Qaeda fighters.
Pakistan claimed that it had captured about 188 Al Qaeda guerillas fleeing from Tora Bora, but on December 20, a group of forty-two overpowered guards, commandeered 4 vans, and in the ensuing melee, at least ten people were killed and an indeterminant number of Al Qaeda fighters escaped. A New York Times story reported that “Taliban Chiefs Prove Elusive” (Dec. 20, 2001), noting that most of the top Taliban leadership had gotten away, either assimilating itself in Afghanistan or fleeing to Pakistan where many had luxurious villas.
Focus shifted to Kabal and the installation of the new interim leader Hamid Karsai in a dramatic inauguration ceremony. The celebration was marred by reports that a convoy of village elders from the Khost area on the way to the ceremony in Kabul on December 20 had been bombed when U.S. planes swept down on a caravan of 15-20 vehicles, killing 60 according to initial reports. The U.S. immediately claimed that they had correctly targetted a caravan of Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders. As details leaked out to Reuters and Western news sources, a story emerged that Pacha Khan, a local warlord, had blocked the caravan’s route, diverted it to an alternative one. The warlord then, reportedly, relayed to the Americans that the group was Al Qaeda and it was immediately bombed out (see Kim Sengupta, “Americans ‘duped’ into attack on convoy,” Independent, Dec. 24, 2001).
Put on the defense, the day of the Afghanistan presidential swearing in, U.S. General Tommy Franks claimed that hand-to-shoulder missiles were fired at the U.S. planes and that it was a legitimate “enemy” target. Western news sources interviewed locals in hospitals who had survived or witnessed the U.S. air attack, all of whom insisted that those “in the convoy were supporters of the new administration,” and demanded that the new Afghanistan government investigate and take action against the American attacks on Afghan villagers. In fact, there were reports some weeks previously that the U.S. had bombed several civilian villages in the Tora Bora area. The U.S. military denied repeatedly that the targets were civilian, but reporters interviewed locals insisting that the U.S. had bombed innocent villagers not connected to Al Qaeda. Yet the issue was dropped in the frenzy of the Bin Laden videotape and final assault on Tora Bora. Evidently, being an American general means never having to say you are sorry, no matter how gross the misdeed. As Salmon Rushdie put it in his novel Fury (2001): “what’s wrong is wrong, and because of the immense goddam power of America, the immense fucking seduction of America, those bastards in charge get away withŠ” [lies, evasions, and crimes].
In interim President Karzai’s swearing-in ceremony on December 22, pictures of the Northern Alliance martyred hero Masoud were everywhere and speakers profusely lauded the Northern Alliance hero killed by Al Qaeda assassins just before September 11. The Times of London noted that despite a phanlax of U.S. officials in the audience, there were no references in any of the speeches to the U.S. which the paper claimed was “snubbed” by Afghans not happy about the ambiguous U.S. role in their country (Dec. 23, 2001).
In Tora Bora, local Afghan fighters seemed reluctant to continue searching through the caves, many of which were badly bombed, for the remanents of Bin Laden and Al Qaeda leadership, or for useful material left behind. After hauling away truckloads of old weapons and other material from the Tora Bora caves, most of the local fighters left to go home, leaving the U.S. with the dirty work of inspecting the caves, perhaps booby-trapped by Al Qaeda and weakened from heavy U.S. bombing. Tommy Franks ordered hundreds of more U.S. troops to search the cave to locate potential Al Qaeda fighters, dead or alive, and a report claimed that one of their duties was to cut off the fingers of dead Al Qaeda fighters to search for DNA match-ups for the leadership, few of whom had been found.
During the days to come, however, the U.S. decided to use U.S. Special Forces and local Afghans to search the caves, rather than a major U.S. military force. Meanwhile, Bin Laden seemed to have disappeared. Some locals and military analysts believed that the voices of Bin Laden heard in the Tora Bora caves were audio-tapes that were played over radio transmission systems to create the impression of Bin Laden’s presence in the caves. There were claims that he’d escaped to Pakistan, although the Pakistani President Mushraeff said it was unlikely that he’d crossed the Pakistan border and could likely be dead in the Tora Bora caves. Other stories had Bin Laden escaping to Iran with friendly supporters and no doubt there would be Bin Laden sightings throughout the world until he was apprehended. George W. Bush insisted Bin Laden would be captured by the U.S., but there was no discernible evidence that the U.S. had the slightest idea where he had slithered away to.
Terror War took some new forms as reports circulated that Bin Laden had an armada of twenty or so “terror ships” that could be loaded with explosives and wreak havoc in crowded Western harbors. One suspect ship was boarded off of England on December 21, held for some days and thoroughly searched, but no lethal contents showed up. Shoreline security in England and elsewhere was beefed up everywhere and there was fear that the next Al Qaeda assault would be a coastal attack via ship. On December 20, the U.S. had mistakenly entered an Iranian oil tanker, thinking that it was an Iraqi vessel smuggling oil; two Iranians were allegedly hurt and Iran lodged a formal protest to the U.S. to demand an explanation.
A bizarre incident on December 23, moreover, indicated that airline security was far from reasonably competent. A tall man without checked luggage got on an American Airlines flight from Paris to Miami, although he had been kept off of a flight the day before because of suspicious behavior and demeanor. On the flight, he tried to ignite his shoe to set off explosives to presumably blow up the plane, but was stopped by a vigilant air steward and passengers.
Although initial reports claimed that the man was not connected to Al Qaeda it turned out that he had been allegedly seen in Bin Laden training camps and had been travelling around Europe and Israel, without visible means of support, creating suspicions of connections to terror networks. Evidently, the suspect, Richard Reid, had gotten a new British passport that erased records of his travels, had been detained by French police because of suspicions, but was allowed to pass through security and enter the flight the next day. The episode revealed that neither state authorities nor airline corporations had markedly improved security and that more attacks on airlines could be expected.
The explosive that Reid carried was highly sensitive and dangerous, leading intelligence experts to conclude that he must have been networked to a terror group in order to have such sophisticated weapons and to travel so often. The Richard Reid incident suggested the existence of sleeper cells still operative and that European and other countries, and the airlines industry, had a long way to go to guarantee security against terror attacks.
Another Bin Laden video was circulated on December 28 which featured a pale and gaunt Osama, who had seemingly aged since his last video. The tape seemed to suggest that Bin Laden was alive as of early December, but appeared more fatalistic, insisting that his Jihad would go on after his death, that the U.S. was carrying out a “crusader” war against Islam, and that Islam would triumph.
As December and the year 2001 came to an end, there was another disturbing report that a U.S. bombing raid on the village of Niazi Qalaye in Paktia province in the early hours of December 20 had killed between 107-170 local civilians. The Pentagon insisted that the village was a hideout for Al Qaeda fighters, but reporters, from the BBC and various British newspapers, gave vivid descriptions of the carnage and testimonies from villagers that the victims were civilians.
Promising that the New Barbarism would continue in the new year, Barbarian-in-Thief, George W. Bush promised that 2002 would be a “war year” in an end of the year radio address. As the economic crisis in the U.S. intensified, U.S. Labor Department statistics indicated that 1.1 million American citizens had lost their jobs in the last year since Bush stole the presidency, with the highest unemployment statistics in years. With worsening economic conditions, the Bush administration needed distraction from the U.S.’s economic woes and were sure to concoct military adventures in the coming year. The Democrats were talking of making the failed U.S. economy and Bush’s tax give-away to the rich, which had eaten up healthy budget surpluses, a big issue in the 2002 elections, and so Bush obviously wanted to keep focus on the Terror War to sidetrack attention from the economy.
On December 31, there were reports that groups of
U.S. Marines were on the way to go after Mullah Omar, but the next day it was
claimed that the excursion had been targeting a Taliban headquarters that was
said to hold intelligence and might still be used by Al Qaeda or Taliban
rebels. The Pentagon claimed that the Marines had raided the compound and
seized materials, but had not confronted any Taliban or Al Qaeda forces, nor
had they found significant intelligence.
As the new year began, there were intensified
accusations that the U.S. bombing had been killing civilians at an alarming
rate. According to the Independent (Jan. 1, 2001):
Villagers in Qalaye Niazi, four miles north of the eastern city of Gardez, said several US warplanes and helicopters took part in the pre-dawn strikes on Sunday. A villager, Janat Gul, who claimed 24 members of his family were killed, told Reuters: "People are very upset ... There are no al-Qa'ida or Taliban people here."
Witnesses said at least 12 houses had been flattened and that the village was littered with scraps of flesh, pools of blood and clumps of what appeared to be human hair. There were a number of large craters in the village. US forces were invited to examine the damage and to find out what happened.
Once again, the U.S. claimed that they had hit a
military target, a compound used by the Al Qaeda and Taliban, and that
“follow-up reports said there was no collateral damage.” A disturbing pattern
was emerging, noted in the British and foreign press, but not the U.S. media.
There were proliferating reports that significant civilian casualties followed
U.S. bombing in eastern Afghanistan and in all cases the U.S. military
aggressively argued that they had hit military targets, discounting reports of
civilian casualties. Each time, independent journalists confirmed the civilian
deaths. In the Gardez incident, the Pentagon admitted that further inquiry had
indicated civilian residences next to the alleged military depot that they had
bombed, but they refused to admit that U.S. bombing had created civilian
casualties in the incident, despite many press reports, and claimed that the
Gardez bombing was still under investigation.
On January 2, 2001, The Times reported that “’Precision weapons’ fail to prevent mass casualties,” claiming that “American bombers may have caused twice as many civilian deaths in Afghanistan in the past 87 days as Nato did in the 78-day air war against the former Yugoslavia in 1999.” The weekends’ toll, the story indicated, raised conservative estimates of Afghan civilians killed by American bombing to as high as 1,000, while one “recent unofficial report by an American academic said that the death toll among civilians could be closer to 4,000.” The Times then summarized accounts of civilian casualties from U.S. bombing:
During heavy airstrikes in the Tora Bora region in eastern Afghanistan last month local Mujahidin commanders said that more than 170 people were killed over several days, including civilians and a number of their own fighters.
In another bombing raid in November local people said that about 150 civilians died in Kunduz and Khanabad.
Earlier in November it was claimed that up to 35 civilians had died in the village of Chokar-Karez, 25 miles north of Kandahar, during an attack by an American gunship. The Pentagon said that there had been a legitimate military target in the village.
Up to 60 people were killed last month in an attack on a convoy of vehicles. The Americans said that they were Taleban and al-Qaeda fighters, but Afghans insisted that they were tribal elders on their way for the inauguration of the new Government in Kabul.
There have been dozens of other incidents in which small numbers of civilians have died, including four workers at a United Nations demining centre in Kabul in October.
A CBS multi-part
news report indicated that part of the problem with the misguided bombs and
missiles was defective batteries made at the Eagle-Picher Technologies Plant in
Joplin Missouri (Dec. 6 and 7, 2001; Jan. 7 and 9, 2002). Workers at the plant
testified to CBS that they had encountered defective products, faked tests, and
corporate cover-up "not on thousands, but on millions of batteries that
they sold." The workers worried that this endangered U.S. national
security and called for investigations.
Afghan leaders
continued to give out contradictory signals concerning their response to claims
of U.S. bombs killing Afghan civilians, with some sharply condemning the U.S.
attacks, confirming villagers’ reports concerning civilian casualties and
demanding a halt to U.S. bombing. Others in the Afghan government defended the
U.S. attacks, including the President Hamid Karsai, who stated that the U.S.
could continue bombing as long as it was necessary to eradicate terrorism. But
obviously there were significant segments of Afghan society who were outraged
by the continued U.S. bombing of civilians and would militate to end the U.S.
military intervention.
Meanwhile, on January 2, once again reports
proliferated indicating that U.S. troops were engaged in a huge manhunt for
Mullah Omar in a mountain village in southern Afghanistan suspected of
harboring the leader. The hunt expanded after the publication in the New
York Times that Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri had written a manual,
found by U.S. intelligence, that urged key members of the Al Qaeda group to
flee early to avoid destruction of the group and to prepare to regroup. Local
Afghan politicians were trying to negotiate surrender of a large number of
Taliban forces around Omar, the U.S. was worried that once again he’d get away,
as when Afghan forces negotiated the surrender of Kandahar, and threatened tribal
forces that they would face U.S. bombing if Omar was not handed over (AP,
Jan. 2, 2001).
On January 4, rumors buzzed in Kabul that Mullah Omar was about to be captured and the Guardian headlined a January 5 story, “U.S. and Afghan forces pin down Mullah Omar.” A coalition of U.S. and “anti-Taliban forces” (ATF) “closed in on villages in the central highlands yesterday where the interim Afghan government claimed that the Taliban leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, and about 1,500 supporters were making their last stand.” The Pentagon asserted that the “action focused on two areas near the towns of Baghran and Deh Rawud, in the mountains north of Kandahar. Afghan and US special forces were reported to have taken up positions around the towns, with US marines behind them cutting off escape routes.”
In a separate operation further east near the town of Khost, a few miles from the Pakistan border, the U.S. suffered its first (admitted) combat casualty when a special forces soldier was shot dead while on patrol near the town of Gardez. A CIA agent was wounded in the incident, which one officer described as an ambush. A few days later, it was reported that a 14 year old Afghan boy had shot the American with unclear motives, and as tribal elders discussed what to do with the alleged teenage shooter, he escaped!
In the same region, the Pentagon had been heavily bombing a major Al Qaeda training camp at Zhawar, that was the target of a 1998 U.S. cruise missile attack which was intended to kill Osama Bin Laden. The camp had been attacked previously in the Afghan war, and the Pentagon claimed that there had been reports that Al Qaeda forces were meeting there again, to regroup, and bombed the camp repeatedly. But evidently once again the Al Qaeda forces had escaped, and nothing was found except destroyed military equipment. Local villagers, however, were angered by the intensity of the bombing and claimed once again that there were civilian casualties and the killing of local individuals who had nothing to do with Al Qaeda or the Taliban.[62]
There was also discouraging news concerning Mullah Omar who was supposedly close to capture. Reuters reported, however, on January 5, “Trail for Omar and Bin Laden Growing Cold.” Afghan forces claimed that there were no Taliban or Al Qaeda forces in the Baghran area where Mullah Omar had purportedly been hiding. Further, a spokesperson for the Kandahar governor said that no clues had been found indicating that Omar had been in the region at all and wondered why it had been assumed he was. A BBC report the same day indicated that Mullah Omar and a group had escaped the area in a motorcycle convoy.
In any case, the failure to capture Mullah Omar was becoming a major embarrassment for both the interim Afghanistan government and U.S. military forces, as was the escape of Bin Laden. By the weekend of January 5-6, it seemed to many that major flaws in the U.S. military strategy were responsible for the escape of Bin Laden, Mullah Omar, and other Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders. Critics argued that the U.S. zero-casualty policy and failure to employ ground troops had enabled top enemy leaders to escape. Just as the U.S. relied on Northern Alliance troops to capture the northern part of Afghanistan and rout the Taliban, so too did the U.S. rely on southern and eastern “anti-Taliban fighters” (ATF). But whereas the Northern Alliance was an organized military operation, of sorts, and strongly anti-Taliban, the ATF were tribal organizations, often of the same Pashtun tribe as many Taliban forces. Moreover, the local tribes and militias had questionable allegiance to U.S. goals and grudges of their own against regional tribal enemies to pursue, in which U.S. forces were used to harm ancient rivals. Moreover, some of the groups were notoriously treacherous and easily guided by Taliban bribes to let their leaders escape.
U.S. general Tommy Franks, in charge of the operation, as if responding to criticisms of his failed strategy, justified reliance on Afghan tribal forces on January 5 by claiming that he was avoiding the mistake of the Soviets in Afghanistan. The Soviets, he insisted, were seen as an invading force, and by working with local groups, the U.S. was overcoming this negative perception. This answer, of course, is evasive and begs the question. Clearly, one can work with local groups and put a significant number of your own troops on the ground in key operations. In retrospect, it is obvious that large number of U.S. troops should have been deployed in the Kandahar surrender to increase the chances of capturing Mullah Omar and major Taliban leaders. Likewise, more U.S. troops should have been put into the Tora Bora region to bottle up escape routes for Al Qaeda forces, and perhaps even get Bin Laden. But instead of a “noose” and a “net,” words that the U.S. military had used to describe their imminent capture of Bin Laden, it was clear that the operation was a sieve with big holes. This was due in large part to the problematic prohibition against deploying major numbers of U.S. troops on the ground for military operations.
It appeared that interrogation of captured Taliban and Al Qaeda forces was now a major focus of U.S. efforts in Afghanistan. The U.S. claimed to have captured one of the top 20 Al Qaeda leaders, said to be in charge in training camps for Bin Laden. The U.S. now held over 270 Taliban and Al Qaeda forces who were under intense interrogation, including American Taliban John Walker. No doubt under intense U.S. pressure, Pakistan handed over the former Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef. The bespeckled and clever Taliban had been the public face of the Taliban regime, holding daily conferences and slyly attacking the Americans to the delight of a large global Arab audience. Obviously, the U.S. wanted to chat-up this fellow and threaten him with long imprisonment and harassment if he did not spill the beans about Mullah Omar and the Al Qaeda connection.
Donald Rumsfeld, U.S. Secretary of Defense, said that those Taliban and Al Qaeda prisoners under interrogation were going to be sent to the U.S. military base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, one of the relics of the Cold War. While there were reports that this move was protested by Cuba’s President Fidel Castro, who had long vilified the continued U.S. occupation of a military base on Cuban soil, a visit by American senators to Cuba claimed that Castro now gave his permission. Accordingly, a make-shift detention center was produced in Cuba and on January 11, the first batch of around 20 prisoners were flown to the camp, with hoods, shackles, and in some case sedation, accompanied by a phalanx of U.S. guards. Amnesty International worried about their treatment and requested meeting with the prisoners to assure that they were being treated humanely. The U.S. was not treating these forces as prisoners of war, governed by the Geneva convention, and was going to interrogate and try them on non-U.S. soil to avoid lawsuits in the U.S. over the Bush administration’s controversial military trials policy.
The Los Angeles Times reported on January 6 that the U.S. was also building military bases in many countries around Afghanistan, with a string of military tent cities and new bases that have sprung up in 13 locations and nine countries in the Afghanistan region. Altogether, according to the L.A. Times story, “more than 60,000 U.S. military personnel now live and work at these forward bases.” The article suggested that these bases were likely to outrage Islamic fundamentalists, as Bin Laden had been incensed by the U.S. bases in Saudi Arabia after the Gulf War. This could also be a dangerous assignment for U.S. troops who would be subject to terrorist attacks in the host countries.
There were reports that Pakistan was pressuring the U.S. to close down some of the bases in their country and that the U.S. was considering complying by building up a permanent encampment in Kandahar and multiplying U.S. military camps in other countries in the region. Some countries were beginning to question U.S. military presence in their territory and on January 19 the Washington Post and various British newspapers published a story indicating that the Saudis were about to ask U.S. military forces to leave the country. Within days, however, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell insisted that U.S.-Saudi relations were fine and that the U.S. had not been asked to close down their bases, although obviously a debate was going on in both countries and their were serious problems between the U.S. and the Saudis.
The possibility of imminent U.S. military action against Iraq was lessened when it was reported that the Bush administration was no longer funding the Iraqi National Congress (INC), the major exile-based Iraqi opposition group. The INC had reportedly not provided adequate accounting for monies already allocated (i.e. millions received from the U.S. was not properly accounted for and the group, based in London, had not provided any tangible efforts).[63] This, of course, infuriated militarists who wanted Iraqi blood for their Sunday afternoon enjoyment and would be forced to satisfy their aggressions elsewhere. Throwing some meat to these dogs, Senator John McClain shouted out after a trip to Afghanistan to meet the U.S. troops, “Next stop Baghdad!”
Meanwhile, the relentless Afghan winter intensified and there were worries about starvation and poor conditions at refugee camps. The State Department had claimed on January 3 that a surge of food aid deliveries had averted the threat of widespread famine in Afghanistan. Yet stories in the New York Times on January 4 and 6 put in question claims of famine avoidance (see “Warlords Steal Food Shipments, Hampering Efforts to Relieve Famine” and “Afghan City, Free of Taliban, Returns to the Rule of the Thieves”). In large sectors of the country, warlords were stealing food and in other parts continued violence and banditry prevented aid agencies from delivery food or medical supplies so Afghanistan was still in a crisis situation, according to many.[64]
Shockingly, although this was not widely reported in the U.S. media, the U.S. was not supporting food and humanitarian deliveries throughout Afghanistan, and had been actively hampering efforts that were believed to conflict with their military endeavors. While the U.S. eventually allowed Britain and the Europeans to establish a police-security force in Afghanistan, it was limited to Kabul, supposedly because the U.S. wanted to continue to focus upon military action against remaining Al Qaeda and Taliban forces in other parts of the country. This policy condemned thousands, perhaps millions, of Afghans to starvation and raised the question why humanitarian and military operations could not be carried out simultaneously.
Highlighting dangers to the ongoing military operations in Afghanistan, on January 9, a U.S. jet crashed in Pakistan, killing all seven aboard; it was later claimed that pilot error was responsible for the jet crashing into a mountain. In another setback for the U.S., it was announced that three major Taliban leaders, including the Defense Minister and Minister of Justice, the notorious Mullah Turabi, had surrendered and then were given amnesty, despite Washington’s claims that they wanted these men detained and tried. Clearly, there were diverse political forces in Afghanistan and many were hostile to the U.S. and not prepared to cooperate with either the central Afghan regime in Kabul or with Washington.
It was indeed not clear exactly what the U.S. military could accomplish in Afghanistan, as it was not certain that major Taliban or Al Qaeda leaders were still in the country. The continued reports of Bin Laden and other terrorist sleeper cells throughout the world indicated that terrorism remained a major problem, but it appeared to many that the war on terror was no longer primarily a military issue. Instead, many agreed that terrorism is more productively seen as a global and a criminal issue that requires a combination of international military, police, and legal solutions grounded in criminalizing, arresting, and shutting down terrorist networks. To effectively fight terror would require using a wide array of global legal, financial, police, and military organizations, rather than depending on the U.S. military as the Superpoliceman of the world.
Although shutting down the Taliban support of the Al Qaeda network, the destruction of some Al Qaeda forces in Afghanistan, and the intelligence founded in the country had clearly provided a material blow against the Islamic terrorist network, it was less spectacular efforts throughout the world that were beginning to systematically undermine the Al Qaeda network. Al Qaeda operatives were arrested in Britain, France, Germany, Spain, and many European countries, and terrorist activities by members of these groups were prevented. In Indonesia, Malasia, the Philippines, and other countries, there were reports that Al Qaeda members were incarcerated and there were global efforts to cut off the financial sources that had allowed flow of funds to support the Al Qaeda organization and projects. The war against terrorism was just starting and it appeared that continued major U.S. military interventions, as in Afghanistan, would not alone suffice to shut down the terror networks, and that more multilateral global efforts would be needed.
In addition, it was doubtful that U.S. military efforts were going to win the hearts and minds of Arabs throughout the world and prevent the rise of further terrorist networks and attacks, and it was probable that excessive U.S. military intervention would create new enemies and assure future attacks. Most critics believed that the U.S. was losing the propaganda war, especially in the Muslim world, which viewed continued military attacks in Afghanistan and elsewhere as assaults against Islam. Moreover, as I discuss in a later section, there was growing controversy over U.S. handling of prisoners of war that was creating international debate and criticism of U.S. policies.
The U.S., however, was suggesting that it was intending to carry out a series of wars by proxy, using local militia forces to fight alleged terrorists in places like Somalia, Sudan, the Philippines and elsewhere to go after terror networks. This strategy, however, seemed highly problematical in the light of the Afghan war and the situation of the countries named as candidates for proxy wars. The U.S. failure in Afghanistan to capture major Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders had largely resulted from relying on proxy troops. The forces that the U.S. had depended on in the Kandahar region and Tora Bora caves had been highly unreliable and allowed many Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders to escape. Without major deployments of U.S. military forces on the ground to do the work, results would be highly unpredictable and ambiguous, as in the Afghan war.
There was growing evidence that indeed the proxy strategy was running down in Afghanistan and meeting resistance elsewhere. In mid-January, there were reports that tribal groups in Afghanistan were refusing to participate further in exploring caves, a major focus of the U.S. effort that was seeking evidence in caves, military sites, and training houses of Al Qaeda membership, tactics, and plans. The same week when U.S. troops were sent to the Philippines to help the government go after rebel forces there, large demonstrations against the U.S. military presence erupted, there were calls for the impeachment of the president who had invited U.S. troops, and both sides backed down, saying that U.S. troops would not actually be sent into the fields, but would serve solely in training and advising capacities. The presence of U.S. troops in the Philippines evoked memories of an earlier U.S. occupation of the country, and some commentators noted that the sending of U.S. military advisors and Special Forces paralleled the Vietnam intervention, that was to prove so disastrous. Once U.S. troop become involved in the complex dynamics of local situations, control over the situation becomes complex, U.S. forces are subject to constant danger, and the results might not be what are intended.[65]
Likewise, critics of planned U.S. military deployments by proxy in Sudan and Somalia pointed out that these regions were in a state of chaos, were highly dangerous and unpredictable, and would be a difficult terrain to navigate and control. Meanwhile, political wars at home erupted as the biggest scandal in modern U.S. history emerged with the collapse of Enron, the corporation that was the biggest financial supporter of the Bush administration, and which had helped produce energy policy and the deregulatory and tax policies that were its hallmark. The crisis galvanized the attention of the media and political class, and generated extreme dangers for the Bush administration, whose scandals, policies, corruption, and history might be exposed at last to media scrutiny.
As Congress reconvened in January after the Christmas break, it was clear that the economic stimulus package had stalled. The Bush administration continued to insist that tax-breaks for the rich and their big corporate supporters like Enron would provide a stimulus for economic recovery. The Democrats weren’t buying this and every reputable economist agreed that current economic difficulties were due to a conjuncture of the Bush tax-give-away, September 11 and the resulting military intervention, and down-turning of the U.S. and global economy. There was a consensus that further tax breaks for the wealthy would make a bad situation worse. Although the Democrats made reasonable proposals for a stimulus package that would put government resources in the hands of those in economic need and workers who had lost their jobs, the Bush administration would not budge and a stalemate on the economic stimulus issue was reached.
Putting on display his blatant demagoguery and basic dishonesty in a January 6 speech, Bush blamed the economic stalemate on the Democrats. He claimed that their policy was to raise taxes and in a memorable Bushism declared with force: "And I challenge their economics when they say raising taxes will help the country recover. Not over my dead body will they raise your taxes." This, of course, was a blatant lie as no Democrat had called for tax increases and were merely suggesting that Congress rescind the criminally irresponsible $1.35 trillion in tax cuts for the wealthy set to kick in over the next ten years that the Bush gang had pushed through Congress.
Congressional budget figures were disclosing at the time that the healthy surpluses of the Clinton era were giving way to disturbing $100 billion dollar deficits in the first Bush year with more alarming deficits forecasts for the future. Bushonomics would raise the national debt dramatically higher, after there had been a bipartisan consensus in the Clinton era to cut back on the debt. Consequently, responsible members of Congress were saying that it would be irresponsible to institute future Bush tax cuts for the superrich in the years to come in such a perilous economic situation.
Indeed, there were forecasts that by the end of the year there would be 1,800,000 more Americans out of work, thanks in part to Bushonomics. The brazenness of Bush’s false claim that Democrats wanted merely to raise taxes and his hyperbolic malpropism “not over my dead body” pointed to growing desperation and hysteria in the Bush administration that was about to be confronted with its worst crisis yet. I noted earlier that the collapse of the Enron corporation in November 2001 and its declared bankruptcy on December 2 created potential embarrassment and corrosive scandal for the Bush administration. The Enron corporation had been George W. Bush’s biggest contributor in Grand Theft 2000 and had helped finance the great theft of the election in the Florida recount wars (see Kellner 2001) and Enron was a major financier for Bush’s inauguration.
Indeed, Enron and the Bushes went way back. Bush affectionately dubbed Enron President Ken Lay “Kenny Boy,” and Enron had not only supported the campaigns of George W. Bush, but went back as a supporter of George H. W. Bush. Ken Lay had long been a close family friend of the Bushes in the Houston business community that included election theft manager and Bush consigiliare James Baker. Bush pere, Baker, and their close friend Bob Mosmacher had been closely involved with Enron in both business deals and political campaigns, so that the Bush-Baker-Enron nexus was deep and far-reaching. Enron was a stronger supporter of Bush senior in the 1988 presidential election and Bush rewarded Enron by calling the Argentine minister of public works to get an Enron pipeline in Argentina. The Argentine president, Carlos Menem, himself a highly corrupt crony capitalist, obliged, making a sweetheart deal with Enron, freeing the company of tariffs and taxes.[66]
From 1988-1992, the Enron corporation continued to be a major corporate supporter of the Bush presidency and Bush senior repayed the favors. Bush asked Lay to co-chair a July 1990 G-7 economic summit in Houston and appointed him to his Export council in 1990. The earlier Bush administration included in its energy act of 1992 provisions to oblige utility companies to carry and transmit Enron energy. Moreover, in Kevin Phillips useful summary: “In In December 1992, Bush's Commodity Futures Trading Commission, chaired by Wendy L. Gramm, wife of Texas GOP Sen. Phil Gramm, created a legal exemption that allowed Enron to begin trading energy derivatives--another growth enhancer for the company. When Bush left the White House in 1993, Enron made Wendy Gramm a company director and signed a joint consulting and investing agreement with James A. Baker III, Bush's secretary of State, and Robert A. Mosbacher, his Commerce secretary. The two were to do Enron's global deal-making for natural-gas projects.
Disclosing the close economic-political connections between the Bush gang and Enron, in 1992 Ken Lay was named co-chair of the Bush election team and host in Houston to the National Republican convention. Despite his attempts to distance himself from Lay and Enron, George W. Bush was also deeply connected with Enron. Lay was a major supporter of Bush’s 1994 election in Texas with Lay and Joe B. Allen of Vinson & Elkin’s Enron’s Houston law firm, the top fund-raisers. Lay chaired Governor Bush’s Business Council and received favor after favor from Bush during his two Governorships. For instance, in 1997, Bush urged then-Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge, now lead of Bush’s Homeland Security, to support an Enron-backed energy deregulation plan for the state and pushed through a similar deregulatory scheme in Texas.
The Bush-Enron connection intensified during Bush’s run for the president in Election 2000. During the 2000 campaign, not only was Lay a major financial supporter of the Bush campaign, but Bush, his family, and friends had Ken Lay’s personal jet at their deposal. During the Florida recount wars, Lay and Enron helped defray the costs and were major supporters of the Bush inauguration in January 2001. And, as would soon become clear, many major players in the Bush administration had close ties with Enron, including Vice-President Dick Cheney.
In early January, 2002, the tale of the Enron collapse was emerging as a story of the biggest business scandal in U.S. history. Every day new dramatic tales circulated of off-shore island dummy corporations (with names like Jedi and Chewco from Star Wars), false bank accounts, tax-dodging schemes, stock swindles, insider trading of the declining stock while top executives sold off their shares, accounting and auditing outrages, document shredding to cover up its wealth of malfeasence, and daily revelations of another core of scandal and connection to Bush administration officials.
As the stories unfolded, Ken Lay was becoming synonymous with Big Business flim flam, and George W. Bush saw fit to distance himself from Lay and Enron, claiming that Lay had supported Democratic Governor Ann Richards in the 1994 governor’s race and only became acquainted with him afterwards. This was a blatant lie as Lay had supported Bush family campaigns for years and knew Bush father and son extremely well. As noted above, Lay was a major supporter of both George W. Bush governor races in Texas, was a major funder of the Bush 2000 presidential campaign, and had long been closely associated with the Bush family and others in the Bush administration.
Bush’s blatant lie was quickly uncovered as Ken Lay himself admitted that he was a close friend of the Bush family for years and supported George W. Bush since 1994 in his bid for the Texas governor race against Ann Richards. The episode of Bush brazenly lying about his own personal history is all-too-typical of Bush mendaciousness and his propensity for revising his past. Bush had repeatedly denied well-documented stories of his business scandals, his association with a number of dubious characters, the sins and disgraces of his business life, and a large number of questions about his personal life. Constantly revising the image of his past had been a defining feature of the short but successful public life of George W. Bush, and he was caught red-handed in his lying about his Ken Lay and Enron connections.
Indeed, Bush had been a life-time recipient of the favors of the sort of crony and corrupt capitalism that Enron and Lay represented. Bush’s failed oil companies had been supported by his father’s friends, other relatives, and figures interested in buying political connections. Bush, like Enron executives had been accused of insider trading when he sold his Harken energy shares just before a report of declining profits lowered the stock value and then failed to properly register his sale with the SEC (see note X). As a politician, Bush repaid favors to his cronies and economic and political investors and was part of a family that embodied the very ethos of corrupt crony capitalism.
Moreover, Bush’s lies about his Enron relations dramatize what I have called “Bushspeak,” a distinctively George W. Bush way of speaking with a purely instrumental relation to truth (see Kellner 2001). The political discourse of Bush and his handlers is intended solely to promote his own political ends, rather than to honestly or accurately answer questions or state positions. Bush has lied about himself his entire life and his staff of spinners, especially Karl Rove and Karen Hughes, have helped construct the tissue of lies that constitutes his official biography and current policy positions. Bush’s corrupt past and present have been spun by his spin-machine so many ways and in such duplicitous fashion that it is probable that Bush himself knows the difference between truth and lie, and thus is able to blurt out blatant whoppers such as his Lay connection denial.
The Enron collapse is indeed big-time, one of the defining events of the epoch. In fact, it is amazing that George W. Bush has been caught up in the three defining events of the Third Millennium, events that are among the most stunning in U.S. history and that happened within a single year: the stealing of a presidential election in Grand Theft 2000, September 11 and subsequent Terror War, and the collapse of Enron and uncovering of its scandalous history. The Enron scandals are especially important for the critical Bushology that I am developing since they reveal the complete failure and catastrophic effects of Bushonomics, the amazingly scandalous history of Bush and his partners in corruption and crime, and the systemic failures of a system that would allow Enron and Bush and his cronies to flourish, loot the system in startling ways, and assume the very pinnacle of economic and political power. When this frightening episode in U.S. and global history is over, it is to be hoped that measures will be taken to avoid such scandal and corruption in the future and that the wrong-doers will be justly punished and a new regime of law, right, and justice established.
It is clear that the Enron scandals reveal the utter unworkability and dangerous consequences of the Reagan-Bush neo-liberal economic policy that deregulates the economy, allows a Wild West capitalism to flourish, and that eliminates regulation, law, and accountability in the economic realm, while placing the state in the service of the most corrupt and greedy corporations. As Governor of Texas and President of the United States, George W. Bush and his associates had done everything possible to deregulate oil and energy corporations and to provide windfall tax benefits and other financial favors to his corporate and wealthy supporters. Hence, Enron, for instance, not only did not have to pay taxes, but got back millions in rebates. Laws and regulations governing banking and accountability of corporations were thrown out the window and the way was open for Enron and Wild West capital to loot the system and undermine the economy with substantial payoffs to the Bush administration and other politicians to look the other way and aid and abet the corporate theft.
A similar looting of the system had taken place earlier and the same cast of characters had been involved in a previous scandal: I am referring to the Savings and Loan scam of the 1980s Reagan and Bush administrations where banking, savings and loan, and other financial institutions had been deregulated and multitudes of corporate crooks stepped in and robbed the financial system, costing taxpayers, according to some estimates, over $500 billion (Lewis 1990). In a way, this systematic corporate crime bonanza was bigger than the Enron robbery and the perpetrators largely got away with it. The S&L thievery surely should have alerted government and corporate officials that deregulation and laissez-faire policy is extremely dangerous and opens the doors to large-scale corruption and crime.
The S&L scandal should have also alerted politicians, the media, and the public to the sort of scam and corruption that the Bush family has engaged in for generations. Architects of the S&L deregulation policy included former Vice-President George H. W. Bush and James Baker who had served as Reagan’s chief of staff and Treasury Secretary, among other offices in an astounding career that has so far escaped wide-spread public scrutiny. A book by former Houston Post reporter Pete Brewton (1992), however, documents how friends and family members of the Bush and Baker family, as well as the Mafia and CIA, took over S&L institutions, looted them, and left the public with the bill.
The slime, scandal, and crimes of the S&L looting and Enron debacle are in some ways similar. After Bush family deregulation of the father and son, the scammers of the S&Ls and Enron crooks went on an orgy of corruption, taking out funds from the S&Ls, for example, and investing them in a variety of schemes and scams that enabled the S&L managers, such as Neil Bush, to skim off big bucks for themselves and their cronies. Enron, as we are now seeing, set up dummy businesses for their scam operations, to hide money, to avoid taxes, to use the firms to hide debt, and no doubt other inventive business maneuvers that will come to light. Both the S&L institutions and Enron threw money at politicians as they scammed the system, making sure that they had political friends in high places. The corporate players in the respective crimes spent money outrageously to buy friends and supporters, ranging from lavish entertainment, often including prostitutes, booze, and drugs, to purchases of a wide range of goods and services that bought good-will and kept money flowing (many Enron creditors, as we are now seeing nightly on television, were left with outstanding bills for products and services rendered, that could bankrupt many small businesses). And Enron even bought journalists and intellectuals, paying them outrageously high fees to speak or consult with the corporation.
Not only does the Enron debacle show that the kind of Wild West capitalism that George W. Bush and his cronies advocate does not work, but it also reveals the appalling connections and histories of the Bush family, especially if seen in connection with the S&L scandal. Enron-Bush connections are multiple, beginning with a history of favors to the Texas-based energy corporation from successive Bush administrations, in George H. W. Bush’s presidency, in George W. Bush’s two terms as governor of Texas, and in his short but eventful term as President. While in Texas, Bush pushed through the Enron agenda by creating the most deregulatory environment imaginable, where the energy companies had almost no state regulation or requirements, to the detriment of the state’s environment, economy, and eventually to the people of Texas who had to pay for the Bush-Enron excesses - indeed, given the collapse of Enron stock and the large number of investors who lost billions, the entire country had to pay for Bushonomics and the shenanigans of his supporters, friends, and cronies.
The scandal of Dick Cheney, oil, and Enron is similarly mind-boggling as I noted above. Cheney admittedly met with Enron executives six times while developing energy, tax, and economic policy and there are allegations that Cheney replaced the head of the energy department regulation, FERC, Curtis Hubert with Patrick H. Wood, a crony of George W. Bush’s from Texas who was previously had of the Texsas Public Utilities Commission and who would be more pliable to Enron’s demands. For months now, there have been demands that Cheney hand over notes and documents pertaining to his Enron meetings, but so far he has stone-walled these requests, opening the way to potential Senate Hearings or Trials that will perhaps provide a media spectacle equivalent to Watergate, or maybe even better.
The entire Bush administration is, in fact, saturated with oil and energy connections and ties to Enron. Cheney, national security advisor Condaleeza Rice, Commerce Secretary and former Bush campaign manager Don Evans, Bush administration economic advisor Lawrence Lindsay, and many others in the Bush administration come straight from the oil and energy industries and Cheney, Evans, Lindsay and others have close Enron connections and were engaged in conversations with Lay and other top Enron officials during its collapse. John Ashcroft, U.S. Attorney General, has had to recuse himself from the Enron investigations because of campaign contributions from Enron and close connections with the corporation, as have other top Justice Department officials. Texas Senator Phil Gramm helped write the rules that deregulated energy production and enabled Enron to create its off-shore entities, avoiding public scrutiny and tax liabilities, while Gramm’s wife Wendy had served on Enron’s corporate board and while both received bundles from Enron.
Bush’s top policy advisor, Karl Rove, always on the take and on the make, had major stock investments in Enron, which he was forced to sell when reports leaked out that Rove owned large blocks of stock in Enron, Dell computers, tobacco firms, and other corporations who had pending government business and demands. Rove reportedly sold the stock but continued to provide lavish favors to those who contributed to Bush campaigns. It was also leaked to the press on January 26 that Rove had recommended to Enron Christian fundamentalist leader Ralph Reed, who was employed for years with the corporation. Rove reportedly want Reed’s support, which he got, for Bush’s run for the presidency in the year 2000, but did not want Reed directly on Bush’s staff as the plan was to package Bush as a moderate “compassionate conservative,” and not a hardright Christian fundamentalist a la Reed.
Top Enron lobbyists had close connections with the Bush administration and the Army Secretary, Thomas E. White, who Bush appointed to bring corporate management skills to the military, came from Enron. And so the Bush administration is caught up from head to toe in an economic scandal that could be bigger than Teapot Dome in the 1920s and a political scandal bigger than Watergate. The Bush administration strategy has been to claim that Enron is an economic affair and not a political one, but in terms of policies and players the economic and political overlap with Bush administration policies and personnel front and center. While millions of people will be seriously harmed by the Enron/Bush scandals, and perhaps the economy will be wrecked, one gazes in amazement at the scale of the corruption and crime. The Enron-Bush scandals bog the imagination in immensity and scale and no doubt we’ve only seen the tip of the ice-berg. It will be interesting to see if, once again, George W. Bush will escape the taint of scandal and political destruction, or if Bushgate floods open and the chickens come to roost, in a spectacle that will keep the public entertained and the media chattering class, lawyers, and judges busy for years to come.
In any case, the pattern of Bush family politics was perfectly clear, although as of the end of January 2002 the media and political class didn’t seem to quite get it. Bush politics involved extraction of large corporate funds to finance political campaigns and then the providing of government largesse and favors in return. Like the Mafia, you reward your friends and punish your enemies. Moreover, you are brazen and daring, aggressive, and without scruples or limits. Indeed, in the midst of the Enron scandals, throughout January 2002 and after, Bush continued to push for tax breaks for the rich as an economic stimulus package, including a $254 tax give-away to Enron!!! Bush continued to extol the virtues of “free markets” and attack government regulation the same days that new Enron scandals were circulating that demonstrated the need for regulation and to manage and oversee market activity.
Indeed, the Enron scandal not only revealed the fallacies of laissez-faire neo-liberal economic politics and the scandalous corporate interconnections of the Bush administration and Enron, but disclosed deeply-rooted failures in the political and economic system. Just as Grand Theft 2000 disclosed the failures of the U.S. voting and political system (Kellner 2001), so too did the September 11 terrorist attacks reveal the limitations of U.S. intelligence and domestic security. And, disclosing a triadic matrix of systemic problems, the Enron-Bush scandal made clear stunning failures in the economic and political system.
Not only did lax government policies enable Enron to pull off its crimes, but the entire system of oversight and regulation failed dramatically. Enron’s auditor, Arthur Andersen, one of the countries major accounting firms and another top Republican and Bush contributor, totally failed in its oversight and auditing responsibility. Arthur Andersen turned out to be part and parcel of the Enron scandals with overlapping interests and officials going from one company to another. Thanks to a change in finance and auditing laws, Arthur Andersen was both hired as a consulting firm with Enron while they were auditing the company, a clear conflict of interests.
The Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) failed to properly oversee the Enron stock frauds and the business press and top Wall Street security firms had been touting the Enron stock for years. As it ascended to number seven on the Fortune 500, year after year Enron was voted the most innovative company in the U.S. and the business press lavished praise on its innovation, leadership, quality of product, and success, while the stock price shot up thanks to its support by leading Wall Street firms and investors.
Revelations of the flim flam and scandal concerning how it made its money, hid its losses, and bamboozled investors and the public, thus disclosing serious flaws in the top institutions of the economy. The bogus corporation was an expert in fictive capital, creating phony satellite companies, borrowing money to finance them, presenting the debt from the loan as a profit for the company, gaining tax liability, and covering losses. This shell game fooled the investing world which praised the company and bought the stock, driving its value up, up, and up, despite the house of cards that one day would come crashing down.
While the Enron story buzzed through the press with new daily revelations and scandals, in an outrageous display of cronyism and partisanship, Bush appointed the highly controversial Otto Reich to a position in the State Department as secretary for Latin American affairs and the son of Justice Antonia Scala, Eugene Scalia, for an important labor Department solicitor post. Reich had long been associated with Cuban and Nicaraguan anti-communist terrorists and had been strongly opposed by Democratic senators, while Eugene Scalia was strongly opposed by Democrats and labor leaders for his antilabor positions. When the Senate had refused to ratify their appointments, the brazen Bush pushed their nominations through by executive order as Congress was in recess, creating outrage among those who understood such matters.
On Sunday, January 13, one of the more bizarre episodes of the incredibly surreal Bush presidency occurred when President George W. Bush fainted while allegedly eating a pretzel as he watched a football game, alone in his bedroom. If the story were true, one would feel sorry for poor George reduced to watching football by himself in his bedroom on a Sunday afternoon, while his wife Laura reportedly was reading in another room, or talking on the telephone, depending on the spin. Medical experts on television provided deeply serious, but unintentionally comical, technical explanations of how a wayward pretzel could momentarily decrease a heart rate and lead to fainting. But Bush watchers on the Internet speculated that the wayward resident had gone off the wagon again, as Bush appeared to have a few days after the deadlocked election in November 2001, when he appeared slightly dazed from the previous night’s activities with a red swollen nose and large band-aids covering what his spinmasters said was a pesky boil that had exploded (see Kellner 2001).
Bush’s appearance the day after his fainting episode was none too reassuring as once again he had a swollen red nose and gaping cuts on his face that were said to be a result of the spill after the pretzel fainting episode. Bush gamely went on the road to talk up his economic program, but critics noted that this was one of his weaker weeks, that he was unable to muster enthusiasm for his unpopular economic programs, and that he appeared lackluster and disconnected.
Meanwhile, every day there was a new revelation in the Enron scandal of documents being shredded, new disclosures of phone calls to the Bush administration pleading for help, new information on connections between Enron and the Bush administration, and new economic consequences of one of the top ten Fortune 500 corporations collapsing in disgrace. Enron employees, investors, and those left will billions of unpaid millions for services rendered were obviously outraged. As a response, they were multiplying lawsuits by the day to get hold of whatever resources Enron would have left and perhaps extract some of the billions made by top Enron executives who sold their stock just before its value collapsed.
Many of these people pursuing lawsuits had documents and replications of incriminating Enron email, bundles of shredded documents, and leaks from Enron employees into the endless ocean of crime and corruption that had marked the corporations infamous history. Tales of Enron Infamy circulated daily through the media. Emails showed that Enron president and major Bush friend and backer Ken Lay had assured employees that Enron was in good financial shape and urged that to buy stock at the same time he was engaged in selling his own stock, obvious insider trading and manipulation of his own employees.
So far the media had not bothered to look into allegations that George W. Bush had himself assimilated his initial nest egg through insider trading. According to the few critical studies of George W. Bush’s remarkable career in business and politics, after years of frat boy ribaldry at Yale, Bush got his father to pull strings so he would not have to go to Vietnam and then got into the Texas National Guard Air Reserves. During his lost years in the 1970s, W. reportedly went AWOL for a year from military duty, was a heavy alcohol and drug abuser, and a nair-do-well failure who finally decided to put together an oil company when he was already well into his 30s. Investors reportedly included the Bin Laden family and other unsavory types.
Young Bush’s initial company Arbusto went bust and was eventually taken over by Harken Energy Corporation, with family friends again jumping in to bail Junior out. Harken soon after received a lucrative Bahrain oil contract, in part as a result of Bush family connections, and the Harken stock went up. But as a member of the Board of Directors, Junior knew that declining profits figures for the previous quarter, about to be released, would depress the value of the stock, so George W. unloaded his stock, in what some see an in illegal insider trading dump. Moreover, young Bush failed to register his questionable sale with the SEC, although later a paper was produced indicating that he had eventually registered the sale, some eight months after he dumped his stock (it helped that his father was President when Junior should have been investigated for his questionable business dealings).[67]
With the money made from his Harken disinvesture, Junior invested in the Texas Rangers baseball team and was made General Manager when some other Texas good old boys put up the money. Using a public bond issue that he pushed upon voters to finance construction of a new Rangers stadium, the stock value of the baseball team went up. Once again, Bush sold out for a hefty profit and then ran as Governor of Texas, despite no political experience and a shaky business history. His two terms in office wrecked the state economy as it went from surplus to deficit thanks to a tax bill that gave favors to the wealthiest, and sweetheart deals and deregulation bonanzas to his biggest campaign contributors. Governor Bush helped make Texas the site of the most toxic environmental pollution and outrageous corporate skullduggery in the country. Bush provided questionable favors to a nursing home corporations that faced state investigation and strong support for the wheelin’ and dealin’ Enron Company, one of the biggest financial contributors to Bush’s campaigns and a corporation that underwent the biggest collapse of any U.S. company in history, under highly questionable circumstances.
Would this story ever come out in public, or would Bush Jr., like his father, manage to avoid general disclosure of his unbelievable history? Would Terror War be manipulated to focus attention away from Bush scandals or would the problems with the economy and public outrage over Enron and other Bush administration scandals focus anger on Bush himself and his astonishingly corrupt family? The survival of U.S. democracy, the global and U.S. economy, and perhaps future of the human race rested on the answers to these questions as it was not clear how far Bush barbarism could push the world into historical regression and possible destruction.
The stakes were raised as a media spectacle when on January 25 dramatic reports erupted that a top former Enron executive had apparently committed suicide. The dead body of former Enron Vice Chairman J. Clifford Baxter was found in his car, apparently dead from a gun shot wound to his head, with the pistol and a suicide note beside him. An Enron whistle-blower had claimed that Baxter had engaged in a feud with then-Chief Enron Executive Jeffrey Skilling about the off-balance sheet deals that the company was using to hide billions in debt and that would eventually bring them down. Baxter was scheduled to testify in Congressional Hearings in Washington the following week and was a defendant in many lawsuits. Obviously, he was despondent over this state of affairs, but the fact that the police did not release immediately the suicide note and crime drama aura to the whole Enron story inevitably created Internet and media speculation that perhaps foul play was involved. In any case, precisely this sort of human drama catches the attention of publics which have difficulty understanding complex economic and political issues and the human drama was thus sure to keep the Enron saga on the front-burner of media attention.
On the Terror War front, it was clear to many observers, though few in the U.S. media and political establishment, that Bush administration quasi-unilateralism and the continuation of the military campaign in Afghanistan was a disaster, isolating the U.S. from its allies, eliciting increasing international criticism of U.S. policies, and deeply offending Muslims the world over. Hence, while in the U.S., Bush administration military intervention in the Terror War was deemed an overwhelming success, this was not the opinion emerging in more informed sectors of analysis and throughout the world.
Within Afghanistan, there was a widely-circulated view that the bombing raids on Tora Bora and the Al Qaeda complex at Zhawar were largely failures. At Tora Bora, the hesitancy to use U.S. ground troops and to rely on local troops had allowed a large number of Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters to escape, including, perhaps, Bin Laden. At Zhawar, although a lot of military equipment was destroyed, there was no material gain and the bombing of local sites without adequate discussion with local authorities increasingly distanced local groups from the U.S. military, refusing, for instance, to help the U.S. military search the still extensive cave network. In both the Tora Bora and Zhawar area, there was growing and intensifying anti-American feelings due to the large number of civilian casualties and displeasure in Afghanistan with the continuation of the U.S. military intervention.[68]
There were definite limits to what U.S. bombing could achieve in the war on terror and the distinct possibility that excessive bombing of civilians and overly aggressive military interventions could alienate both Afghans and allies in the struggle against terrorism. Worse, there was the real possibility that the growing anti-Americanism in Afghanistan and throughout the Islamic world as a response to continued U.S. bombing of civilians in Afghanistan, the mistreatment of Islamic prisoners, and threatened interventions throughout the Islamic world could breed a new generation of terrorists reacting against what was perceived as barbaric American attacks against Arabs and inhuman treatment of its prisoners.
The perception that the U.S. was treating and acting toward Arabs in a dehumanizing way was intensified with coverage of U.S. handling of the members of the Taliban and Al Qaeda captured during the Afghan war. From the beginning, engaging in the sort of Orwellian euphemism character of Bushspeak, the U.S. refused to call those who were captured “prisoners of war.” The U.S. had insisted that the detainees were “unlawful combatants” and not “prisoners of war” who would be subject to the Geneva conventions, leading to a hail of international criticism. Pictures were shown in the New York Times, English papers, and throughout the world showing the prisoners in Afghanistan with bags over their heads and in chains and shackles. These pictures received almost no commentary or mention in the U.S. media, although there were some criticisms in foreign journalism circles.[69]
Pictures, however, of the prisoners taken from Afghanistan and landing in Cuba in fluorescent orange jump suits, blacked-out plastic goggles, turquoise face masks around their mouths and nose, knit hats pulled over their heads, ear cups to block out sound, mittens encompassing their hands, and shackles on their legs created a firestorm of controversy, leading to claims that the prisoners were being submitted to excessive sensory deprivation. Likewise reports that the prisoners were shaven of their beards and hair, part of their religious identity, and were housed in concentration camps, exposed to the weather, lit at night with beaming florescent lamps, sleeping on concrete slabs, and living in a glare of publicity created a debate about the conditions under which the prisoners were housed.
Called “Camp X-Ray” by the American military prison guards, because you could see right through it into the skeletons of human beings rapidly being stripped of their humanity, the camp elicited a thunderstorm of criticism, mostly, however, in diplomatic circles and the foreign press. There was disparagement of the food which included bagels and cream cheese and fruit loops, as well as “Islamic” prepackaged TV dinners.
The British government and media were especially upset with the conditions of incarceration and treatment of the prisoners, and there were reports that the barbaric situation was creating a serious chasm between the two major allies in the war against terrorism. The British Foreign Minister Jack Cross was especially upset, and Tony Blair reportedly called Bush to tell him that Britain expected more humane treatment of the prisoners. The European Union external relations commissioner, Chris Patten, said that the West was in danger of losing international support and the moral high ground if prisoners were mistreated or executed. Lord David Russell-Johnston, president of the Council of Europe’s parliamentary assembly, said pictures of the captives published over the weekend raised troubling questions about their treatment: “We’re supposed to be better than terrorists,” he said. Javier Solana, secretary general of the European council, the German foreign minister Joschka Fischer, and head of the Dutch government urged the U.S. to treat the captives according to the Geneva conventions and international law. And ambassadors from countries from where the prisoners originated were demanding humane treatment for their citizens and criticizing the U.S. military prison.[70]
On January 14, the International Committee of the Red Cross (IRIC) argued that those being held by American forces must be counted as prisoners of war under the Geneva Convention and were entitled to the full protection offered by it. They also insisted that the U.S. euphemism “battlefield detainees” had no legal meaning, a criticism also made by many of the next term, “unlawful combatants,” that the U.S. propaganda ministers cooked up to justify the U.S. refusal to follow international guidelines and legal requirements. The IRIC also declared that prisoners being held in Kandahar in Afghanistan were being kept in unsheltered stockades in the bitterly cold winter and without privacy.
The U.S. military, especially Donald Rumsfeld, U.S. Secretary of Defense, feistily defended the prison conditions. Rumsfeld made the obvious arguments that there “are among these prisoners people who are pefectly willing to kill themselves and other people.” This is true and points to a serious security issue, but does not answer the question of whether the specific conditions of detention were necessary or justified, why the prisoners should not be treated according to Geneva conventions, and why the U.S. choose Guantanamo Bay in the first place. More racist overtones were heard in the Pentagon General’s justification for treatment of the prisoners during their transportation from the U.S. to Cuba and incarceration in what appeared to many to be concentration camp conditions. One Pentagon General asserted that the prisoners were so dangerous that they could “cut through hydraulic cables” with their teeth! And eventually even the Washington Post, that had so far strongly supported the Afghan war and the U.S. military intervention, suggested that Guantanamo “has been a public relations Šdebacle.” It criticized Rumsfeld in particular “whose handling of the prisoner issue has done much to ignite the international controversy. The globally broadcast misinformation about which he complains stems largely from his own policy of strictly limiting media access to Guantanamo while offering accounts of U.S. handling of the prisoners that have been by turns vague, flippant or simply wrong” (Jan. 25, 2002: A24).
The Red Cross maintained on January 21 that circulation of the pictures of the prisoners bound and blindfolded, and the subsequent publicity controvened the Geneva Conventions article that forbid prisoners to be displayed for publicity and to protect their privacy. The Red Cross persuaded the U.S. to allow them to regularly inspect the prisoners, to register them, and to help improve treatment. Human Rights Watch claimed that the U.S. was violating international law by avoiding the POW label, while a team of American lawyers led by former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark filed a petition in Los Angeles requiring the U.S. government to bring the detainees at Guantanamo Bay before a civil court to define the charges against them and to provide them with legal representation.
Granting that the Al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners might be hard cases and highly dangerous, on pragmatic and instrumental grounds, as well as moral and legal ones, it wasn’t clear what was the positive benefit of treating the prisoners in a controversial and arguably barbaric fashion. The war against terrorism, as I have argued throughout this study, is largely a global one and the primary challenge is for the U.S. to gain allies in what is shaping up to be an epochal struggle and, most importantly, to change U.S. image and perception in the Arab world, to bring Arabs into modernity and the global world, and to isolate Islamic fundamentalist terrorist extremists of the ilk of Bin Laden and his gang.
From this perspective, the U.S. handling of the Afghanistan war prisoners has been a public relations disaster. From the legal perspective, critics claimed that the U.S. is violating international law and standards in handling prisoners of war, opening U.S. military to future barbaric treatment, and encouraging barbarians all over the world to dismiss humane treatment of those perceived as their enemies. International legal authorities maintained that the U.S. violated the rights of the prisoners in the first place in deciding that they were indeed war criminals rather than allowing an international body, or recognized court, to determine if those detained were indeed combatants and thus prisoners of war. The U.S. treatment, according to its critics, also disregarded the Geneva convention that required prisoners to be kept under similar conditions as their keepers and to be treated with dignity and humanity.
From a moral point of view, the U.S. treatment of the prisoners is promoting and spreading barbarism and undermining civilization, making the world a more ugly, dangerous, and violent place. Human Rights Watch put out a devastating 660 page report that U.S. repressive legal and military policies were already being used by the governments of Russia, China, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Zimbabwe, and elsewhere to justify brutal treatment of political prisoners, intensifying a New Barbarism throughout the world. The War on Terrorism was allowing repressive governments everywhere to declare its critics and opposition as “terrorists,” to imprison them without basic legal rights, and to treat them as they wished, exactly as the Bush administration was doing with its prisoners.
Moreover, practically and pragmatically speaking, pictures of the wretched treatment of Arab prisoners was generating hatred of the U.S. around the world, guaranteeing revenge and Jihad, signifying that innocent civilians in the U.S. and elsewhere will once again pay the price for a barbaric and out of control U.S. military and political administration. What, indeed, is positively accomplished by the maltreatment of these prisoners, the failure to label them as what they obviously are, “prisoners of war,” and to treat them according to the Geneva conventions? Likewise, failure to provide basic legal and human rights and to judge the prisoners according to accepted law and practices, preferably in an open court, could only turn large segments of the world against the U.S., perceived as an aggressive and vicious bully, and create more enemies for the U.S. and future retaliation.
There was also the irony that the prisoners were being held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, a hangover from an earlier era of U.S. imperialism and a relic of the Cold War. The U.S. had seized the base in 1898 during the Spanish American war and formally leased the land around Guantanamo Bay in a 1903 treaty with Cuba, renewed in 1934, from a rightwing and corrupt government that was eventually overthrown by Fidel Castro and his merry band of revolutionaries. Castro had repeatedly told the U.S. that he wanted them off the island and a Cold War standoff had emerged. Putting the prisoners in this contested historical space was a highly unusual decision and points to the surreality and lack of good common horse-sense that is characteristic of the Bush administration and U.S. military which has surely presided over one of the most bizarre and incredible years in U.S. history. [As a curious aside, I might note that the U.S. military regularly refers to Guantanamo Bay as “Gitmo,” a racist construction that holds the Spanish language in contempt and in its ordinary language connotations signifies “get more,” a perfect formula of imperialism (i.e. get more land, resources, and wealth from them there natives!).
Thus, on a pragmatic level of what the U.S. was actually going to do with these prisoners, the fruits of the strange Bush administration/Pentagon policy were becoming an international embarrassment and growing public relations problem. A British minister told the London Times (Jan. 20, 2001: “Picking people up, giving them a good going over and sticking them on a plane to Cuba isn’t what our police and security services would do. Our forces would have gone through the whole thing on the ground much more closely in terms of following through the contacts of the individuals, where they are based and witnesses and so on.” Indeed, what did the U.S. think it would gain by bringing these prisoners to Cuba? Wouldn’t it have been better to set up detention centers in Afghanistan or the region, to carefully question them, to find out as much as they could about the individual prisoners networks and connections, to try to re-educate the prisoners in terms of proper Islam, and perhaps to turn over some of the prisoners as informants? Certainly, hard cases were not going to bend, but they could be turned over to their home countries who could probably deal with them in a more effective manner than the bumbling U.S. jailers and military. It indeed appeared that the U.S. had no real plan or strategy to use the prisoners in any way that might advance the war against terrorism and whose barbaric treatment was likely to gain more enemies for the West.
A report circulated on January 23 that the Bush administration expected to “send most detainees home” raised questions about the rationality of the policy in the first place that had obviously caused more harm than good. The same day it was announced that the U.S. was planning to review its treatment of the prisoners, had temporarily suspended the incarceration of more prisoners, and was rethinking the whole affair. The Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC) reported on January 23 that Canada, currently engaged in police and military activity with the U.S. in Afghanistan, was having serious reservations concerning turning over prisoners to the U.S. There was concern in Canada that prisoners would be held under controversial conditions and subject to the death penalty in military trails. Further, the British Foreign Minister, Jack Straw, straight-out declared that any British citizens held under conditions not governed by the Geneva Conventions should be returned for incarceration and trial in Britain. The response of close U.S. allies to their refusal to recognize the importance of holding prisoners under international law pointed to a potential collapse in the supposed coalition against terrorism, which appeared more and more to be a unilateralist project of the Bush administration and Pentagon.
The Bush administration and overwhelming majority of U.S. pundits assaulted the European criticisms, put forth “war is hell” arguments and that since Al Qaeda does not play by the rules, there is no reason that they should be treated according to international law. These thuggish arguments miss the point that if the Terror War is a struggle between civilization and barbarism, international law should be affirmed and the prisoners should be treated in a way above criticism. There is also a human and legal rights argument that individuals imprisoned during war-time conditions should have a “competent tribunal” judge them and make charges and if presumed guilty should receive a fair trial. This is another ground on which there is legitimate cause for concern as many allies in the war against terror do not approve of Bush’s military tribunals and oppose the death penalty.
Recognizing the dangers of a public relations fiasco, members of the Bush administration provided assurances that most of the prisoners would be sent to their home countries after interrogation. In addition, a memo was leaked to the Washington Times on January 27 that Colin Powell had recommended a review of the Pentagon policy, suggesting that the prisoners be interviewed, with some labeled as prisoners of war and with a commitment to treat them under the Geneva convention, to show respect for international law.[71] The same day, however, Donald Rumsfeld, U.S. Secretary of Defense, visited the Guantanamo Bay camp and once again affirmed that the detainees would not be referred to as POWs, nor would the Geneva conventions apply, leading the U.S. media to discuss a Powell-Rumsfeld split, while foreigner observers worried again about the “Rumsfeld problem.”
Negative effects of U.S. citizens and potential problems for U.S. troops from the POW controversy surfaced when a Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was kidnapped in Pakistan. The Journal and other news sources received an e-mail from a group declaring that Mr. Pearl was being held "in very inhuman circumstances quite similar to the way Pakistanis and nationals of other sovereign countries are being kept in Cuba by the American army. If the Americans keep our countrymen in better conditions, than we will better the conditions of Mr. Pearl and all other Americans that we capture" (cited in Guardian, Jan. 28, 2001). For the next weeks, the Pakistani group played cat-and-mouse with their detainee, declaring that he would be executed within 24 hours if the kidnapper’s demands were met, then extending the deadline. Another communique proclaimed that Pearl had been killed and that Bush could find his body in the graveyards of Karachi. Taunting the U.S., the group proclaimed that Pearl was “collateral damage” and that they were “thirsty for the blood of another American,” frightening journalists and other Americans in Pakistan.
There were also emerging criticisms that a U.S. military assault on Somalia would be “a waste of effort.” A U.S. government adviser, Ken Enkhaus, declared that only 10-12 Somalis had significant links to the Bin Laden network and that reliable U.S. intelligence was “exceedingly low,” increasing the risk of a repeat of the botched American intervention in 1993. Interestingly, this debacle was being given a positive spin as an episode of U.S. heroism in the film Black-Hawk Down (2001), which was exciting audiences throughout the world. In the U.S., there were criticisms that the movie sugar-coated the actual problems with the U.S. military intervention in Somalia and worries that a future U.S. adventure by the Bush administration and Pentagon would meet similar problems. There were reports that in Somalian cinemas there were loud cheers as the Somalians in the film shot down the U.S. helicopter, and pursued and killed the American soldiers, attesting to growing anti-American sentiment in the Muslim world against Bush administration policies.
Within Afghanistan, a conference in Tokyo on January 20-21 had raised pledges of about $4 billion of support from various countries for rebuilding the war-torn country, although there was disappointment that the U.S. had not contributed more. When U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell had visited Afghanistan before the Tokyo conference, he was confronted by cabinet minister Sima Samar, the Women’s Affairs Minister, who called upon the U.S. to pay for 75% of the reconstruction of Afghanistan, noting that “the donations should be equal to the cost of the bombs dropped on Afghanistan” (The Observer, Jan. 20, 2001). In fact, although the Bush administration had claimed that their policy would be both military and humanitarian, the latter was obviously subordinated to the former, as the U.S. had refused for months to support humanitarian efforts to get aid to civilians. Moreover, there were worries in Afghanistan that the U.S. would once again pull away when their military intervention was concluded, as they did done in the earlier Bush administration, after the Soviet Union had left the country.
Meanwhile on the military front, the Pentagon announced that there was a skirmish between U.S. forces and supporters of the former Taliban regime 60 miles north of Kandahar that resulted as many as 15 Taliban fighters killed and 27 captured. The Times reported that there was a renegade army of up to 5,000 Taliban soldiers with 450 tanks, armoured carriers, and pick-up trucks in tense scrimishes with U.S. troops (Jan. 25, 2001). The Guardian reported the next day that “remnants of Al Qaeda fight on,” claiming that hundreds of Bin Laden’s fighters have blended into the Kandahar region and are preparing for trouble. But, once again, it also was reported soon after that villagers were accusing the U.S. of killing anti-Taliban leaders in a recent bombing attack. An article by Rory McCarthy in the Guardian (Jan. 28, 2002) noted:
Švillagers yesterday insisted the US troops had been badly misled. They said the victims of the attack at Hazar Qadam were headed by an ethnic-group leader called Haji Sana Gul, who had just disarmed a number of Taliban fighters still holding out in the area.
His brother Bari Gul said the men spent Wednesday night in the local madrassah, or religious seminary. Before dawn the next day US troops swept in, killing several people in the madrassah, including Haji Sana Gul himself.
Two of the dead had their hands tied behind their backs, Bari Gul said. Three more people were killed in a building a mile away.
Yusuf Pashtun, an aide to the Kandahar governor Gul Agha, said he too believed American commandos had struck the wrong targets. "It looks like it was raided by mistake," he said. "The people of the district centre are very much against the Taliban."
It appeared that almost every U.S. bombing raid over the past month or two had gone array, killing civilians and anti-Taliban forces rather than Al Qaeda or Taliban forces. The U.S. seemed to be getting exceptionally bad intelligence and their misguided attacks were becoming a major embarrassment to the interim President Hamid Karzai who was getting pressured by tribal leaders to get the U.S. to stop the military attacks that were largely hitting civilians or even anti-Taliban forces. For about a week after reports that the U.S. had mistakenly killed pro-government forces, the Pentagon finally admitted that they had received bad information, conceding for one of the few times that they had made errors.
There were also embarrassing stories that bomblets from cluster bombs were continuing to kill civilians. In a story “Long after the air raids, bomblets bring more death,” Suzanne Goldenberg wrote that “at least 41 peoiple have been killed and 46 injured in Herat and nearby villages by cluster bombs which did not immediately explode when they were unleashed by the U.S. bombers, but nestled in the soil and bided their time” (The Guardian, Jan. 28, 2002). Goldenberg’s account provides heart-wrenching accounts of innocents killed or maimed by the unexploded cluster bombs, raising the question of why the U.S. deployed these deadly anti-personnel munitions in the first place in Afghanistan.
A report published by the Project on Defense Alternatives explained why there were such high casualty rates from U.S. bombing in the Afghan war. Comparing the U.S. Afghanistan campaign with the Kosovo air war, the group concluded that the rate of civilian casualties was at least four times higher in the Afghanistan war due to greater emphasis on Global Positioning Systems that are less accurate than laser-guided bombs; that there was heavier use of enormous bomber airplanes in Afghanistan; and there was an increased use of cluster bombs and other anti-personnel devices. Demographic features, like higher population density, and poor intelligence also contributed to the higher casualty figures in Afghanistan.
Interim President Hamid Karzai visited Washington on January 28, the first Afghanistan leader in decades to do so. Since he was trying to get increased aid and support for his country, he did not publicly criticize Washington for its recent attacks on Afghan civilians or criticize U.S. policy. Karzai had pleaded on the eve of his visit for more international security forces in other parts of Afghanistan, but he was not able to get a commitment from the Bush administration to provide security forces or increased humanitarian aide. Instead, George W. Bush offered Afghanistan support to build a military and train police forces. Critics, however, felt that the last thing Afghanistan needed were more military equipment. Moreover, it was feared by some that training military and police forces might result in instructing forces which would eventually be anti-American, as with the CIA financing and training the Islamic fundamentalists who later became Al Qaeda and other anti-American terrorist forces in an earlier era of Afghan history. The issue of serious civilian casualties from past and present U.S. military operations in Afghanistan did not come out in public and Karzai appeared to many observers and his opponents within his country as an all-too-compliant American puppet who might not have a long career in the morass of Afghan politics.
During the Karzai visit, Bush seemed to equivocate on the status of the U.S. prisoners in Guantanamo Bay. On January 29 his administration stated that they were considering Colin Powell’s request to agree to treat the detainees under the Geneva conventions and international law, although they continued to refuse to provide POW status to those incarcerated. Bush himself verbally prevaricated in a White House Rose Garden press conference with Karzai, twice calling the fighters “prisoners” and then excusing himself and substituting the word detainees, as when he stated "We're in total agreement on how these prisoners or detainees, excuse me ought to be treated," Mr. Bush said. Bush insisted that he would listen to “all the legalisms, and announce my decision when I make it.”[72]
The situation in Afghanistan continued to be dangerous for U.S. forces and new evidence was surfacing of Al Qaeda terrorist plots. CNN reported on January 25 that documents were found in a Kabul house used by Al Qaeda operatives that suggested the organization was building a serious weapons program, with a heavy emphasis on developing a nuclear device. A U.S. prisoner turned over by the Bosnian government was labeled a top Al Qaeda aide. And reports continued to proliferate concerning new terrorist cells turning up in Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, and elsewhere. Clearly, the Al Qaeda network was being pursued on a global level and blocked in at least some of their terrorist projects, but it was equally clear they had not closed down shop and continued to pose threats to the U.S. and its allies.
In a hospital outside of Kandahar, there was a dramatic storming of a section of the building that had been occupied by Al Qaeda fighters who had armed themselves with grenades and threatened to blow themselves up if apprehended. A six-week standoff had resulted, where U.S. Special Forces had ordered that they be starved out, but sympathetic supporters had smuggled in food. On January 29, U.S. Special Forces and Afghan soldiers threw grenades into the occupied ward of the hospital and in a gun battle all six of the foreign fighters were killed. The next day, a Red Cross official claimed that U.S. officials had assured him that there would be no raid on the hospital, which the Red Cross was administrating, and would inform the Red Cross in case of a change of policy, but had failed to do so.
While media attention had been focused on U.S. incarerated Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters in Guantanamo Bay Cuba and their legal status, controversies were also growing concerning the imprisonment of Al Qaeda and Taliban forces in Afghanistan. An inspection team from the Physicians for Human Rights claimed that conditions at Shebhargan prison, near Mazar-f-Shariff, were “in grave violation of international standards for those held in detention or as prisoners of war.” According to the group, collections of 110 prisoners were being held in cells designated for no more than 15 “in conditions described as overcrowded and unhygenic, and where inadequate food and medical supplies have led to deaths” (Independent, Jan. 29, 2002). In view of the fact that so many Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters had gotten away, and many Taliban had negotiated releases, it was awkward that some continued to be incarcerated under questionable conditions.
On January 29, a U.S. helicopter crashed, injuring sixteen, the latest in a series of aviation mishaps that had claimed 11 American lives in the Afghan intervention. The plane went down in the Khost region in eastern Afghanistan, and the crash was attributed to pilot error. Meanwhile, it was announced that the U.S. anti-terror campaign in the Philippines would begin with 600 troops due to arrive, including 160 Special Ops forces. While there had been controversy over the U.S. mission and mixed signals as to whether it would go forth, it appeared that the U.S. was about to embark on another military adventure. On January 30, however, it was reported that there was a glitch concerning whether the U.S. troops would or would not serve under the authority of the Philippines military. There were also large demonstrations in the Philippines against the U.S. troop deployment. But in early February, despite continuing demonstrations against the US intervention in the Philippines, it was agreed that the U.S. troops were going to carry on their mission under the command of the Philippines military. This concession ironically evoked conservative opposition in the U.S. on the grounds that American troops should not be subject to “foreign” military command.
To assure funding for continued U.S. military interventions into the far future, George W. Bush was requesting in his January 29 state of the Union address a massive defense hike of $48 billion, the biggest increase in military spending in over twenty years. It appeared that the promises of Donald Rumsfeld, U.S. Secretary of Defense, to cut unnecessary military spending and programs were put aside in favor of across the board hikes in military spending. Programs included the controversial Crusader artillery system, owned by the Carlyle Group that contains former President Bush and James Baker. Indeed, the Bush budget was full of items that would benefit family, friends, and supporters and one wondered how long the Bush gang would get away with using national security to enrich their own.
In his televised state of the Union address on January 29, Bush promised an epoch of Terror War, expanding the Bush doctrine to not only go after terrorists and those who harbor terrorist groups, but to include those countries making weapons of mass destruction. Claiming that Iraq, Iran, and North Korea constituted “an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world,” Bush put the “world’s most dangerous regimes” on notice that he was planning to escalate the war on terror. Rattling the saber and making it clear that he was perfectly ready to wag the dog if Enron or domestic scandals and economic failures threatened his popularity, Bush put “rogue states” and terrorists everywhere on notice that he was prepared to go to war indefinitely against an array of targets in an epoch of Enduring Terror War.
As was becoming his norm, Bush’s team was able to orchestrate an impressive media event with celebrities like Hamid Karzai, interim president of Afghanistan in the audience next to Laura Bush, along with members of U.S. military families, New York firemen, and other icons of September 11. Moreover, Bush was learning to read his teleprompter speeches with proper emphasis and pronunciation, but was not able to rid himself of his tale-tell smirk, weird darting eye gestures, and increasing arrogance and self-satisfaction. He also took the occasion to announce new dangers to the U.S. via plans found in Afghanistan to blow up U.S. nuclear installations, public monuments, and other targets.
In fact, these documents had been found weeks before and had already been discussed in the media, so Bush was simply using the threats to legitimate his own militarist agenda and to deflect attention from his own failings at economic policy and the involvement of himself and others in his administration in the Enron scandals. Certainly, terrorism remains a threat to the U.S., but to exaggerate the dangers, to escalate the war, and to engage in excessive rhetoric is arguably not the way to deal with the problem. In a round of TV interviews that preceded Bush’s address, one of his advisers Karen Hughes claimed that Americans face dangers from up to 100,000 terrorists trained in Afghanistan and deployed worldwide. Eyes bulging and lower lip tremulous, the utterly mendacious Hughes, who has made a career of lying for Bush, made it clear that Terror War would be a major focus of Bush administration policy. Terrorist experts were dumfounded at the spinmistress’ far-fetched fantasizing with Stanley Bedlington, a former CIA terrorism analyst insisting that “Al Qaeda has never had that kind of strength.” Bedlington continued: “I just came back from a luncheon with about 15 specialists. If I dropped that like a rock into a stagnant pool, there would be roars of laughter” (AP, Jan. 29, 2002).
Likewise Bush’s rhetoric of “evil” was becoming tiresome and worrisome to many. He used the term evil at least five times in his State of the Union address and included countries like Iran in this litany, itself undergoing complex domestic changes. Furthermore, what Bush did not mention in the State of the Union speech was also significant. He did not mention Osama Bin Laden and the Al Qaeda and Taliban leadership that he had failed to apprehend. Bush did not mention the stunning deficits that his fiscal mismanagement had produced, glossing over the reversal in one year from the largest surplus in U.S. history to a stunning $100 billion plus deficit (with estimates rising by the week).[73] Bush claimed that the “state of the union had never been so good,” but in fact during Bush’s presidency the nation suffered one of the greatest one-year reversals and declines in U.S. history. The U.S. economy was suffering massive unemployment, the Enron scandal was harming investor confidence and pointing to glaring problems that Bushonomics had helped produce, while the national deficit was sky-rocketing.
Moreover, in his State of the Union address, George W. Bush out-voodooed Ronald Reagan in his calls for wildly increased military spending, a jump in home security spending, large tax cuts for the wealthy, and a 9% increase in basic government programs. Bush was willing to finance this budget with a more than $100 billion deficit for 2002 and an $80 billion budget deficit for 2003. One tries to imagine the uproar this would create if the Democrats had urged such irresponsible deficit-funding of the government. It was startling clear that the Bush administration were returning to the giant deficit spending that had seen the Reagan years double the national debt, while Bush I in his failed four years of economic mismanagement doubled the national debt once again. Every responsible economist believed that it was necessary to keep the deficit and national debt under control to ensure U.S. economic stability but once again the Bush administration embarked on a rash and dangerous economic policy that could end in catastrophe for the U.S. and global economy.
Looked at more closely, Bush’s State of the Union address could be read as a cunning use of Terror War to push through his indefensible domestic programs like the Star Wars missile program, his tax break and give-away for the rich, and his social service programs that would advance a conservative agenda (i.e. people and charities would solve social problems and not government). The “evil axis” countries could be used to legitimate producing the Star Wars missile defense system that critics had claimed had not been proven workable. While on one hand, the very notion of an “axis of evil” suggests Bush administration geopolitical confusion and misunderstanding, on the other it opens the way to any military intervention whatever. And by calling attention to countries that produce weapons of mass destruction, it legitimates a missile defense system that will at least allegedly protect the U.S. against nuclear missile attack.
Most incredibly, Bush was using the Enron collapse to push his tax give-away program and discredited pension plan. Although Bush did not mention the unmentionable name of “Enron” in his speech, the day after the State of the Union Bush called for pension reform in the light of the Enron collapse using the national tragedy to push his social security stock scam, telling workers that with better investment advice and some protection, they would be better off with retirement plans in which they could choose to invest their own savings! As if the Enron scandal had not revealed the uncertainty of investment and dangers in the stock market!
The emphasis on care, compassion, sacrifice, national service, and community voluntarism in the State of the Union gave Bush credence as a compassionate conservative, as opposed to a hardright thug and selfish manipulator of crisis and tragedy for his own political ends. But the emphasis on patriotism, national unity, and moral community function both to identify his party and policies with patriotism, but also to identify anyone who criticized his foreign or domestic policies as “unpatriotic.” Lynne Cheney, wife of U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney and a longtime cultural warrior against the left, has been circulating texts documenting unpatriotic statements by University professors and has been leading an assault against dissidents to Bush administration policy on the grounds that they are not patriotic and supporting the president in a time of war and danger. Stressing national unity and patriotism that thus provide a cover for suppressing dissent and difference and should be viewed critically.
Moreover, by appropriating the language of “moral community” for a conservative “homeland defense” against terrorism and “an axis of evil” redefines community in conservative terms as those who identify with U.S. government policy. It also subordinates discourse of social justice, civil rights, and democracy to pulling together in the name of national unity, a move that can easily be used to suppress dissent and progressive agendas.
Thus Bush is using the terrorist attacks and national security to push through his rightwing agenda. While Congress wildly applauded Bush’s jingoistic and aggressive speech, the rest of the world was stunned by the irresponsibility of Bush’s barbaric “axis of evil” doctrine. The Guardian cited Bush’s “Hate of the Union” and escalation of militarist rhetoric and an editorial in the paper chided “George Bush’s delusion” that the September 11 tragedy gave Bush a free hand to lead the world into infinite war (Jan. 31, 2002). The French paper Liberation found Bush’s tone “more martial than ever,” and Le Monde noted that U.S. allies Russia and China were chief suppliers of “military programs” of the countries Bush singled out. The Russians complained that their allies were being included in the axis and that the improving relations with Washington would be subverted if Bush expanded the field of war. Close allies Germany and Japan were put off that Bush used the loaded word “axis,” that evoked World War II and the crimes of the Third Reich and Japanese, events that their countries had tried to overcome.
A number of countries were upset about Bush’s threat to act unilaterally against terrorism if “some governments were timid in the face of terror.” Bush’s jibe was aimed against countries like the Philippines who insisted that they had been resolute and effective allies in the work against terrorism. And, of course, Iran, Iraq, and North Korea were shocked that Bush had collapsed them into “an axis of evil,” which inadvertently strengthened the hands of hardliners within these regimes to resist accommodation with the West and especially the U.S. which was threatening them with extinction.
The State of the Union address showed the dangerous demagoguery that was becoming the very essence of George W. Bush. Totally bereft of ideas and insight himself, Bush is an empty vessel programmed by rightwing ideologues and fanatics. The very lunacy of his “axis of evil” shows a hysteria, a desperation, and a willingness to do anything possible to assert U.S. power and to justify U.S. aggression. The Bush doctrine is a demented concretion of his father’s “new world order” in which the U.S. is the superpoliceman of the world, positioning itself as the beacon of civilization who is able to define “the axis of evil” and go after whoever it labels in this category. But such discourse serves as a cloak for a project of U.S. domination of the world and global hegemony, promoting the “full spectrum dominance” that certain Pentagon ideologues have long dreamed of.
In the view of European critics, however, Bush’s speech showed that “the Bush administration “is not now primarily engaged in a war against terrorism at all” but U.S. world dominance, thus “abandoning whatever remaining moral high ground the U.S. held onto the wake of September 11.”[74] David Talbot commented in Salon (Feb. 14, 2002) that Bush’s rhetoric is a “flight of idiocy” that reveals how Bush sees the world in the simplistic “black-and-white terms of the born again fundamentalist that he is.”
Bush’s term “axis of evil” is indeed highly misleading and semantically inaccurate. An “axis” implies a coalition and connection between countries, embarking on a common project of domination. Iraq and Iran have long been bitter enemies, fighting a vicious war between 1980 and 1988 (in which the U.S. cynically supported covertly both sides, leading to the Iran/Contra affair and helping to produce the Iraqi military machine that invaded Kuwait and prompted the Gulf war; see Kellner 1992). North Korea, of course, is a whole other question and its neighbors South Korea, Japan, and bordering countries were extremely distressed by Bush’s rhetoric which reportedly harmed the faction in South Korea trying to moderate North Korea’s behavior, while helping the conservative factor wishing to promote a hardline against North Korea.
Choosing Iran as part of the tripartite axis, a throw-back to the fascist triadic axis of the 1940s, is an act of stupendous geopolitical stupidity that stunned Iran and others around the world. During the Afghan Terror War, Iran showed great sympathy for the U.S. intervention, strongly condemned the September 11 bombings and the Al Qaeda network (which had long been a strategic enemy), pledged itself to help extricate U.S. servicemen in danger in Afghanistan, and were part of a network of humanitarian aid. Moreover, within Iran there had been pro-American and anti-government demonstrations in recent months, showing a desire, especially on the part of the young, to reach out to the West. There were, to be sure, recent reports of Iran playing the old strategic game in Afghanistan by arming a warlord on its border to curry favor, perhaps undermining the central government in the region. But there were serious reform movements in Iran that many Western powers were trying to aid and strengthen, while Bush’s aggressive rhetoric was reinforcing the credibility of conservative and anti-Western factions by demonstrating once again U.S. hostility against Iran.
Moreover, how, in the light of post-September 11 politics could Iran be deemed part of an “axis of evil” over, say, Saudi Arabia? It was well-known that the Al Qaeda network had its strongest financial and personnel support network in Saudi Arabia, where Bin Laden’s family had long lived. 15 of the 19 terrorists were Saudis and there were reportedly over 100 Saudis in the Guantanamo Bay camp that had been the focus of controversy, with a Saudi diplomat recently calling for their release. The controversial “dinner with Bin Laden” tape that had been played with such fanfare by the Bush administration showed strong support within Saudi Arabia for Bin Laden and a recent poll indicated that 95% of the Saudis were sympathetic to Bin Laden.
Further, the day after Bush’s “axis of evil” speech the Guardian (Jan. 31, 2002) printed articles indicating that there had been at least 8 terrorist attacks on Westerners in Saudi Arabia over the last year, that Westerners had been tortured to confess to responsibility, including one British citizen who was himself a victim of a bombing! Yet applying the label of “evil” even to Saudi Arabia is highly problematic. In a series on the troubled relationship between the Saudi Kingdom and the U.S. in the aftermath of September 11, the Washington Post revealed the hitherto not discussed Saudi dropping of oil prices immediately after the terrorist attacks, instead of raising them as planned, in order to help the U.S. economy recover (Feb. 14, 2002).
But the main problem with the “axis of evil” discourse is that it is likely to alienate both Arabs and allies. Arabs are extremely incensed over Bush’s fast and loose use of the word “evil” to apply to Arab countries and the “axis of evil” serves to position many Arabs against the West. Moreover, U.S. allies were expressing extreme distress over the term and Bush’s speech, which implied a rabid unilateralism, that the U.S. would go it alone in its crusade against evil, worrying the rest of the world that U.S. intervention would become increasingly dangerous and destructive.
Thus, whereas a sane global policy against the international threat of terrorism would imply bringing in as many Arab allies and other countries as possible in the war against Islamic extremism, Bush’s “doctrine” was likely to alienate both Arabs and allies in the struggle. Further, it positioned the U.S. as the main target of global terrorism and the object of future likely retaliation. Thus, Bush’s axis of evil concept is probably the most cockamamie political idea advanced by a U.S. president during my life-time.
This is not to deny that weapons of mass destruction are a serious issue and that eliminating them would be a rational and highly desirable goal. But in fact it is precisely the Bush administration that has refused participation in every major treaty to control or eliminate weapons of mass destruction (see Kellner 2001). The U.S. is the rogue nation in terms of development of weapons of mass destruction and blocking treaties that could lead to their elimination. A rational plan to eliminate weapons of mass destruction would thus be to criminalize their use, to build a coalition of nations that renounced these weapons, and that worked to systematically eliminate them.
Despite the reckless, dangerous, and irresponsible tone and thrust of Bush’s speech, shamefully and predictably, the U.S. media gushed over Bush’s performance, failing to criticize it. Throughout the day of the State of the Union, the cable television networks outdid each other in building anticipation for Bush’s speech and hyping the president’s popularity and brilliant accomplishments. After the speech CBS’s Dan Rather celebrated it as “a solid even eloquent address,” while NBC’s Andrea Mitchell found it “amazing.” On CNN, William Bennett, the country’s self-proclaimed morality czar, praised Bush’s “speech of moral confidence”, while Rudy Giuliani deemed it “philosophical” and “spiritual.” Television commentators from across the board oohed and aahed about how President Bush was “transformed.” In fact, Bush usually delivered a preprepared speech that he had time to rehearse competently, and there was nothing spiritual or transformed about his bellicose rhetoric, pushing his hardright agenda with ideological platitudes, and pushing buttons in his audiences to gain applause.
The day after, newspaper commentators almost universally applauded the speech. The Hall of Shame for pandering punditry includes Washington Post columist Mary McGory’s “Triumphal Oratory” that eulogized Bush’s “stunning” speech while babbling about his “phenomenal” popularity. Walter Shapiro in a USA Today piece gushed over Bush’s “awe-inspiring popular support,” deeming “Bush more than entitled to enjoy this moment.” Bob Herbert in a New York Times Op-Ed piece, “As Bush’s Stature Rises,” effused over “the bond that is developing between President Bush and the American people,” while William Safire in a commentary “’To Fight Freedom’s Fight’” praised Bush’s speech and urged him on to attack Iraq, Iran, and North Korea!
Although Bush’s arrogant posturing was playing well domestically, it was faring increasingly poorly in the global arena where it is necessary to gain allies to effectively stop terrorism. Responding to global fears of Bush’s bellicose militarism and to ally fears that Bush’s rhetoric was going to lead the world into war, Bush administration spokespeople tried to assure the world that Bush would be restrained in choosing military targets and that his rhetoric was simply to “put on notice” countries that supported terrorism would be subject to U.S. intervention. Visiting British Foreign Minister Jack Straw told the British press that Bush’s “evil axis” speech was “vote-getting rhetoric” and for domestic consumption rather than a serious threat of immediate military action.
At first, Bush administration spokespeople seemed to back away from the implications of Bush’s speech, saying that he was just sending the “axis of evil” crowd a “message” and to “put them on notice” that they were being closely watched. By the end of the week, however, Bush himself played up the rhetoric in domestic speeches and interviews and over the weekend top administration figures, including Colin Powell, defended the axis of evil doctrine as “a wake up call” to the international community. Condoleeza Rice sternly rebuked Jack Straw who had said that the phrase was only for domestic political consumption, stating that “when the British government speaks about foreign policy, it’s not about British politics.”
The problem with Bush’s rhetoric, however, is that it was further angering and alienating those in the Arab world who the U.S. must persuade to renounce terrorism and militant Islam. Bush’s rhetoric and use of military force was likely to help recruitment of Islamic militants and to make acts of terrorism against the U.S. more likely. And while a major challenge for U.S. diplomacy was to build a global coalition against terrorism, Bush’s aggressive unilateralism was likely to weaken global coalitions and undermine global efforts. Indeed, top European officials at a major NATO security conference over the weekend of February 2-3 came away in despair at Bush’s bellicose unilateralism, fearing that it would destroy NATO and create serious political divisions in the years to come.
Further, British conservative party leader, the former governor of Hong, and current European Commissioner for international relations , the highly respected Chris Patten, deemed Bush’s doctrine “absolutist and simplistic.” The French prime minister Lionel Jospin, warned the US not to give in to “the strong temptation of unilateralism.” European commentators worried that Bush’s bellicose rhetoric would alienate allies and isolate the US, and snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Others condemned Bush’s continual whipping up of fear of terrorism, leading to the paradoxical syndrome of “arrogance and fear” that Anatole Kaletsky dissected in the London Times (Feb. 7, 2002).
Some critics suggested that Bush’s “axis of evil” speech was intended to draw away focus from his failure to apprehend major Taliban and Al Qaeda leadership, or domestically to make progress in the war against terror. In fact, it has rarely been noted in the U.S. media that global efforts to arrest terrorists have been much more striking and effective elsewhere in the world than the U.S. It is astonishing that not only has the Bush administration utterly failed to apprehend the source of the anthrax attacks and panic that followed the September 11 attacks, but despite thousands of arrests, so far the U.S. has not charged one suspect of terrorist involvement or publicly exposed one plan targeted at the U.S. (Zacarias Moussaouri was arrested before the September 11 attacks and later charged when his complicity with Al Qaeda and the actual September 11 attacks was suspected).
By contrast, the British newspapers that I read regularly document arrests of terrorist suspects and breakup of terrorist groups all over England. Likewise, other countries have also been highly effective in arresting local terrorists, foiling plots, and seriously damaging the terror networks. It seems that this patient intelligence, police, and judicial work is more effective than the blustering posturing of a George W. Bush. Thus, while the overthrow of the Taliban and destruction of the Al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan definitely struck at the Bin Laden network, the failure to apprehend top leaders makes the U.S. military intervention a mixed result at best.
Further, continued U.S. military blundering with murder of Afghan civilians and the fierce global controversy over the treatment of Terror War prisoners is arguably undercutting U.S. authority to lead the war against terrorism and revealing stark limitations of Bush administration policies and personnel. During the first week of February, for instance, there was a stream of revelations of U.S. military mistakes in which for the first time the Pentagon acknowledged that they may have killed civilians in recent raids by mistake. The Pentagon acknowledged, for instance, that the much criticized raid on a village in Uruzgan province, south of Kandahar, on January 24 had killed civilians. 27 Afghans held in the raid were released and there were reports that US Special Operations Forces were handing out $1000 bills to families of survivors, with ABC news showing tribesman displaying their bills. Soon after, several of those released claimed that they were beaten and kept in cages by the US troops, suffering serious injury.
Bill Moyers’ PBS program Now on February 9 featured an Afghan American woman going back to her native country and interviewing relatives who had lost family members because of US bombing errors. On February 11, the Pentagon conceded that a missile strike the previous week at a suspected Al Qaeda handout had killed peasants and supporters of the Afghan government. Thus, it appeared that continued US military presence in Afghanistan was taking a serious toll and creating international scandal and outrage among the Afghans. The Karzai government tried to minimize the uproar, blaming the problems on poor intelligence and local Afghans using the US to settle ancient hatreds and scores.
Furthermore, President Bush’s constant rhetoric of “evil” began wearing thin, as was his administration’s failure to come up with rational proposals and policies. Fear was escalating that the Bush administration was becoming a major liability in the global struggle against terror and the escalation of its unilateralist military interventions will no doubt make matters worse. There were also criticisms beginning to circulate that the Bush administration was manipulating and exaggerating reports about future terror attacks to keep up terror hysteria and to deflect attention from its domestic problems, failures, and growing scandals.
While the Bush administration and U.S. Justice Department has generally failed to produce dramatic domestic results in the war against terror, John Ashcroft, U.S. Attorney General, struck a blow against the terror of nudity, when he demanded that a nude statue of a 12 foot high woman figure of Justice have her breasts covered. Ashcroft was reportedly embarrassed at being photographed with the bare-breasted woman and the puritanical Talibanesque Attorney General demanded Burka-like coverage to protect him and other like-minded puritans from the dangers of female nudity.
Yet the hypocrisy sweepstakes for new year go the U.S. Supreme Court Justice Arthur Kennedy who set out with Laura Bush to launch a “morals program” in Washington area high schools, to compensate for a lack of “moral outrage” among some high school students following the September 11 terrorist attacks. “I thought this was an attack on the rule of law, and there should be a legal response,” Kennedy explained. Justice Kennedy, one of the Felonius Five, who committed treason in making a purely partisan judgement in choosing George W. Bush as President in the U.S. Supreme Court coup d’etat, himself launched a wave of moral outrage when he voted to stop the ballot counting in Florida and ratify George W. Bush as president, an event that also elicited strong critique in the legal community (see Bugliosi 2001, Dershowitz 2001, and Kellner 2001). It seems that many of the worst scoundrels in the U.S. system are using September 11 to cover over their own sins.
Not only had the Bush administration declared war against open government by refusing to release reports of Dick Cheney’s meetings with Enron executives in formulating Bush administration energy policy, but there were reports that both Bush and Cheney were pressuring Democratic Senate Majority leader Tom Daschel against looking too closely into the failures of U.S. intelligence that made September 11 possible. Cheney himself was head of a U.S. counter-terrorist group and it would be interesting to know what he did to prevent terrorist attacks and if he had himself heard any of the warnings of September 11 that were both global and domestic in scope (see Carolyn Kaye’s website that has collected a series of prior warnings to foreign and U.S. governments that a major terrorist attack was aimed for the U.S. in September, warnings that the Bush administration seemed to neglect in what would surely be a major scandal if it was documented that they had ignored serious advancing warning).[75] As the Enron Wars heated up, there were dangers for the Bush administration that the entire web of entanglements with Enron and other shady corporations would become unraveled. If the shocking program of deregulation pushed by Bush-Cheney, favors to corporate contributors, and failure to provide security for the U.S. economy and polity, making the U.S. vulnerable to terror attacks and economic collapse of its major corporate allies like Enron, were brought to the light of day, the Bush administration would suffer the consequences.
Vice-President Dick Cheney had allegedly met with members of the Enron Corporation at least six times as he was overseeing U.S. energy policy, a task that obviously preoccupied him when he was supposed to be chairing an anti-terrorist task force. Obviously, Cheney’s priority was to get as many favors as he could for his oil and energy corporation buddies. In his stunningly regressive program, Cheney urged increased production of oil, coal, and nuclear energy, cutbacks in environmental regulation, and privatization and deregulation of energy throughout the U.S. Further, Bush-Cheney tax policy was to give breaks to its major corporate funders, rewarding obsolete fossil fuel companies and energy traders like Enron, at the expense of developing alternative sources of energy, thus making the U.S. energy system dependent on rapidly depleting fossil fuels and predatory energy traders. Revealing the entanglements of the Bush administration and energy industry and the dangerously irresponsible and corrupt energy policy worked out by Cheney and his corporate allies could be a major scandal for the Bush administration.
The General Accounting Office (GAO) and Congressional committees had been requesting from Cheney a list of who he had met with, which individuals and corporations had put what imput into the energy plan, and how he had generally proceeded. Cheney had been stone-walling these requests, but the intensity of the Enron scandals, and allegations that Enron had written in at least 15 proposals into the final Bush energy plan, had led to renewed interest in the Cheney energy policy group. There was also interest in a variety of other energy corporations whom Cheney had met with and what provisions he wrote in his policy to meet their needs.
The GAO had been threatening Cheney with lawsuits if he did not divulge the information and both Bush and Cheney had made it clear that they were not surrendering information, leading the GAO to announce in early February 2002 that they were going to sue the U.S. government for the documents and information required. Cheney claimed, as always with these scoundrels, “executive privilege” and that he wanted to leave the office of Vice-President stronger and did not want to weaken it. These high-sounding principles spelled suspiciously in the stink of Cheney’s deep and corrupt involvement with the energy industries. Interestingly, not only did the liberal press push Cheney to give up the information, but so too did political conservatives, fearing that failure to disclose would create a public fight, bad publicity, and increased embarrassment for the Bush administration. There were also criticisms of Cheney’s deceptive response to the media when queried about his stonewalling, whereby Cheney tended to position a Democratic congressman as the source of the query, whereas it had been the GAO, led by a Republican, who was pushing for Cheney’s notes and response.
Major battles over U.S. domestic politics also loomed in the horizon. Both Bush and Cheney urged Tom Daschle not to hold hearings or look too closely into the intelligence failures that had caused the U.S. not to be prepared for the September 11 attacks. Cheney had been put in charge in May of a homeland security anti-terrorist group, but had obviously done nothing. The inevitable question concerning possible preknowledge of the September 11 terror attacks by U.S. or foreign intellegence service emerged: what did Cheney know and when did he know it?
If he knew nothing, if Cheney himself were not responsible for gathering and analyzing reports of possible terrorist attacks on the U.S., then this is a mighty failure of leadership by Cheney and the Bush administration. If Cheney himself had received word of the score of warnings from multiple domestic and foreign sources of the danger of a September attack by the Bin Laden network, Cheney should resign immediately, as this blunder would be one of the biggest in U.S. political history.
In any case, so far Cheney himself has taken no responsibility for his failures in protecting the U.S. from the September 11 attacks and few critics have pinned this upon him. Perhaps, although he was appointed head of a homeland security antiterrorist group, and had reviewed at least five reports on terrorist dangers, he was not engaged in these issues, focusing instead on energy policy and making sure that Enron and other major corporate contributors to the Bush-Cheney campaign, and his other oil-energy corporate friends and allies, got all that they wanted in energy deregulation and policy. Of course, the Enron collapse highlighted the scandalous role of the Bush administration in producing energy policy that had little to do with U.S. needs, the environment, or global economy and everything to do with the interests of Bush administration corporate funders and allies. This itself is a major scandal and will probably mean that Cheney’s life in the Bush administration will be short and unsweet, although so far Cheney has gotten away with astonishing corporate scams and political scandal without significant media focus or political debate.
Another set of upcoming political battles and scandals were revealed in a Washington Post story by Eric Pianin, “Bush Budget About to Show its Darker Side” (Feb. 3, 2002: A01). While Bush was proposing the most fiscally irresponsible budget in U.S. history that would raise military spending to astronomical heights, that would provide billions in tax relief and credits to the richest 1% and top corporations, and that would increase overall government spending by 9%, there were deep cuts for crucial programs. According to the Post story, Bush would “seek sharp cuts in highway funding, Army Corps of Engineers water projects, congressional environmental initiatives, job training and scores of other domestic programs, reflecting the darker side of the fisacal 2003 budget that calls for record spending increases for the military and for domestic security.”
Bush would thus allow the infrastructure to decay, weakening the U.S. economy and quality of life, while giving unparalleled wealth to his favorites in the oil and defense industries (where Bush, Cheney, and others in the Bush inner circle had heavy investments). Not only would Bush’s economic stimulus package contain nothing for job training, but he would cut back on existing programs! Moreover, he would dip into social security and medicare to pay for his government handouts to preferred corporate sectors and friends. And when the Bush administration unveiled its $2.13 trillion budget for 2002 it contained a $344 billion tax cut for the rich and $591 billion over the next ten years, while the deficit for this year was now forecast as $106 billion!
This is perhaps the most outrageous fiscal theft in history, but it makes perfectly clear the ultimate goals and substance of Bushonomics. Bush obviously wants to destroy government programs like social security, medicare, job training, and other aspects of the welfare state to promote a warfare state where sectors of the military-industrial complex connected to the Bush gang would prosper and those outside of its influence would suffer. The perpetual Terror War would legitimate this radical restructuring of the U.S. economy and polity, just as it would justify cutbacks in civil liberties and erection of a police state. The Bush plan to rob the federal treasury for its corporate allies and to produce a military/police state for the New Millennium is stunningly audacious and frightening to behold. Would the pusillanimous Democrats and corporate media stand up to Bush and prevent his destruction of the liberal welfare state, open society, and undermining of the U.S. and global economy?
After the Putsch of Grand Theft 2000 obviously the Bush Reich is the next step. Would the Democrats and media reveal the magnitude of the Bush threats to the Republic and exploitation of Terror War for his own hardright and corporate agenda? Would the people become informed into what Bush was really up to and turn against him? Would the rest of the world see the dangers to the global economy and world peace of an American Reich? Or would collapse of the world economy and an era of warfare be the fate and perhaps the end of the human species as we entered into a dangerous new era of history?
Thus while Karl Rove urged Republicans to push Bush’s success in the Terror War in the next election, in fact one pressing issue would be Bush’s war plans for the future and destruction of the U.S. economy and political system. Did the American people want to fight endless wars all over the world against alleged terrorists who may or may not be a threat to the U.S.? Did the American people want to isolate themselves from the world and serve as the superpoliceman, losing friends and gaining enemies with each intervention? Would Bush be allowed to paper over the scandals of his administration and top corporate allies with unending war? Would Orwell's 1984 prove to provide the template of the new millennium as the world plunged into endless war, freedom and democracy were snuffed out in the name of freedom, in which language lost all meaning, and history was constantly revised (as Bush revised his personal history)? Would Orwell’s dark grim dystopia replace the utopia of the information society, the new economy, and a prosperous and democratic globalization that had been the dominant ideology and vision of the past decade?
While Budget battles loomed on the horizon and Bush threatened perpetual Terror War against the “axis of evil,” the Enron scandal continued to threaten the legitimacy of the Bush presidency. Over the weekend of February 3-4, the Enron wars heated up. A report that Enron had commissioned written by William Powers of the University of Texas law school concluded that Enron’s collapse was the result of “a systematic and pervasive attempt” to inflate profits and to hide losses, rather than simply a matter of a few rogue employees breaking the rules. Moreover, in congressional testimony on his report Dean Powers noted: “What we found was appalling. There was a fundamental default of leadership and management. Leadership and management begin at the top, with the CEO, Ken Lay.”
The Enron report was widely discussed on the Sunday talk shows and in the press, and Ken Lay’s testimony before a Senate committee on Monday was keenly anticipated. Lay cancelled on Monday morning, however, and his lawyers said that the unfavorable publicity over the weekend and the “prosecutorial” attitude of Congress led Lay to cancel his appearance (although congressional staff members said that they had not expected Lay to appear anyway). The Senate voted to send Lay a subpoena that would force him to testify and in a press conference after the meeting Senator Ernest Hollings (D-SC) made the sharpest critique of the complicity between Enron and the Bush administration yet to be aired. Hollings accused Bush and his administration of being in Enron's pocket, and creating a "culture of government corruption". The Guardian (Feb. 5, 2002) provides a useful summary of Hollings remarks that reportedly infuriated Republications:
"I've never seen a better example of cash- and-carry government than this Bush administration and Enron," he said. "Specifically, everyone knows how the Bushes got the cash," he added, referring to Enron as "the largest contributor to the Republican committee running the convention and the inaugural committee and everything else like that".
He recited a list of cabinet members and other administration officials who he claimed had formerly been on the Enron payroll, as employees, advisers or lawyers.
The list included the attorney general, John Ashcroft, whom the senator described as "Enron's man"; the president's economic adviser, Lawrence Lindsey; the army secretary, Thomas White; and the energy secretary, Spencer Abraham. He accused them all of pursuing policies that were favourable to Enron.
The justice department issued a statement rejecting the Democrats' demands for the appointment of a special counsel to look into the Enron scandal. It insisted there was no conflict of interests involved in the inquiry it was conducting.
Ken Lay was now the poster boy for corporate corruption and a villain for our time. The previous week his wife had appeared with Lisa Meyers on NBC, the GE network always sympathetic to corporate scoundrels. In tears, Mrs. Lay pleaded for the innocence and goodness of her husband and cried about their own financial woes, claiming they were reduced to one house.[76] Evidently Hills and Knowlton, the infamous public relations firm that had manufactured Bush I’s Gulf War propaganda (see Kellner 1992), had advised Mrs. Lay to try to gain sympathy, but the result was national revulsion. Reporters had a field day discovering that the Lay’s still owned a bevy of houses, which had not been put in the real estate market as Mrs. Lay had claimed, with one headline noting, “Enron chief down to last dozen houses.”
The parallel between Ken Lay and S&L poster boy Charles Keating was striking. Just as Keating had spread the ill-gained wealth from his looting of California S&Ls to family members, so too had Lay provided his children with lucrative positions in Enron, contracts for business, or other favors. Both the Keatings and the Lays purported to be solid Christians and philantropic members of the community. Both were conservative Republicans who spread political donations far and wide to both parties, and both received bountiful political favors which when uncovered created great embarassment to recipients (recall the “Keating Five,” five senators who had received contributions from the S&L crook, including John McCain and astronaut hero John Glenn).
Senator Hollings’ connection of Enron and the Bush administration was revealing and was bringing into the open what everyone knew and what the Bush administration was trying so hard to hide: that Bush and Enron were closely connected and bound up together in a culture of corruption. Hollings’ reference to “cash and carry government” makes the point that I made in Grand Theft 2000 and have been making throughout this study: the basic practice of Bush politics is to receive money from contributors and return the favor with political deals, favors, and handouts. Bush had done this systematically with Enron and other major contributors during his days as Texas governor and in his presidential administration. The deal was, bring me the cash, and I’ll do you the favor, public be damned!
It could also be pointed out that Enron and Bush pursue the same practices of lying and hypocrisy, while advocating the same brand of market cutthroat capitalism. As I have argued in Grand Theft 2000 and this study, Bushspeak is a discourse of lies and hypocrisy. Obviously, Ken Lay and his Enron empire were built on a web of lies and deception and painted in a panorama of hypocrisy. For year, Enron lived and got away with the Big Lie that they were an innovative corporation that would bring wealth and prosperity to its partners and investors. Bush, of course, was pushing the Big Lie that his brand of unleashing predatory capitalism and providing favors to his benefactors would benefit everyone. Unfortunately, it might well take the bankruptcy and collapse of the U.S. economy to finally cue the public in to the depth of Bushian corruption and catastrophe. In the words of David Vest: “The Bush agenda is to do to the nation with Ken Lay and his cronies did for Enron - loot it for the benefit of the people at the top, loot the economy, loot the environment, loot the public wallet, leaving ordinary citizens to foot the bill and clean up the damage, like ruined Enron employees” (www.counterpunch.org, Feb. 5, 2002).
In the meantime, the fall of Ken Lay was breathtaking to behold. One of the most popular, successful, even revered, corporate leaders had turned overnight into a villain and perhaps the most reviled individual in the U.S. One could only hope that the Bush family would soon be subject to similar uncovering, revelation, and universal contempt. When people are scammed they are resentful and when it is perceived that someone who was trusted is untrustworthy and corrupt the public’s response is anger and the desire for justice.
It was also stunning how the current mutations of corporate capitalism had produced such disastrous results. Early in the 20th century, German social theorist Max Weber noted that the earlier era of capitalism marked by inner-worldly asceticism, rational capital accounting, and moral rectitude was coming to an end, being replaced by a more predatory, amoral, and cutthroat capitalism. In a prescient passage Weber described:
In the United States, where it has been given most freedom, acquisitiveness, stripped of its religious and ethical meaning, tends today to be associated with purely competitive passions, which often give it the character of a sporting context. No one knows as yet who will live within these confines in the future Š[or] whether there will be a state of mechanised petrification, embellished by a kind of frenzied self-importance. In that case it might indeed become true to say of the ‘last men’ of these cultural development: ‘specialists without soul, hedonists without heart: this ciphers flatters itself that it has reached a stage of humanity never before attained.’ (Weber 19xx: 171).
Weber’s ideal type of the new capitalist anticipated EnronMan, a completely amoral seeker of wealth, luxury, and power. Whereas the earlier capitalist produced actual goods and services, the new predatory Enron capitalism bought up products, services, and commodities produced by others, as well as buying up stock futures, derivatives, and other fictive investments. Enron capital reproduced by hype and buzz that drove up its stock, enabling it to buy more imaginary businesses, juggle its books, writing off loans and loses as profits and creating an imaginary picture of its enterprise. The house of cards was bound to fall and in so doing discredited an entire mode of capital accumulation.
By February 5, it appeared that Ken Lay was on the lam. A house congressional committee tried to serve him with a subpoena through his lawyer who said that he could not accept the document for Lay because he did not know where his client was! The House and the media found this “puzzling,” although the next day Lay’s lawyer confirmed that he now had the subpoena and would testify the next week, setting off speculation as to whether Lay would actually testify or take the Fifth.
Meanwhile, the country saw some of the faces of the key Enron villains. Several Enron executives took the Fifth, but former president Jeff Skilling testified that when he stepped down on August 14, 2001, “I believed the company was in strong financial condition.” When told by the chairperson of the committee that when staffers interviewed Skilling in December he had said that when he left Enron “the company was in the best shape it ever was,” he continued insisting that he knew nothing of the company’s growing problems, the shady deals that would bring it down, and the efforts to cover over the impending collapse.
No one believed Skilling and over the weekend of Feb. 9-10, congressional members on the weekend talk shows said that Skilling had probably perjured himself and could be subject to prosecution for his testimony. Ken Lay announced that he would take the fifth and not testify during his summons to Congress and the scandal continued to simmer, leading Bush administration spin doctors to desperately try to portray Enron as a mere economic issue and not a political one.
[to be continued]
In conclusion, I want to argue that in the light of the Bush administration attacks on democracy and the public sphere in the United States and elsewhere in the name of a war against terrorism, there should be a strong reaffirmation of the basic values and institutions of democracy, especially as they come under attack by regimes like the Bush administration. Furthermore, there needs to be a global movement against terrorism, militarism, and social injustice and for democracy, peace, environmentalism, human rights, and social justice. Rather than curtailing democracy in the naming of fighting terrorism we need to strengthen democracy in the name of its survival and indeed the survival of the planet against the forces of violence and destruction. Rather than absolve Bush administration domestic and foreign policy from criticism in the name of patriotism and national unity, as the administration’s supporters demand, we need more than ever a critical dialogue on how to defeat terrorism and how to strengthen democracy throughout the world, the networked society, and a global culture.
Democracy is in part a dialogue that requires dissent and debate as well as consensus. Those who believe in democracy should oppose all attempts to curtail democratic rights and liberties and a free and open public sphere. Democracy also involves the cultivation of oppositional public spheres and as in the 1960s on a global scale there should be a resurrection of the local, national, and global movements for social transformation that emerged as a reaction to war and injustice in the earlier era. This is not to call for a return to the 1960s, but for the rebirth of a global movement for peace and justice that builds on the lessons of the past as it engages the realities of the present.
In addition to re-affirming democracy, we should be against terrorism and militarism. This is not to argue for an utopic pacifism, but to argue against militarism in the sense that the military is offered as the privileged solution to the problem of terrorism and in which the military is significantly expanded, as in the Bush administration massive military build-up, and promotion of unilateral military action. Thus, while I would argue that military action against terrorism is legitimate, I would oppose U.S. unilateralism militarism outside of the bounds of recognized military conventions and law, and would favor more multilateral action in the context of global law and coalitions.
There is little doubt that that the Bin Laden and Al Qaeda terrorists are highly fanatical and religious in their ideology and actions, of a sort hard to comprehend by Western categories. In their drive for an apocalyptic Jihad, they believe that their goals will be furthered by creating chaos, especially war between radical Islam and the West. Obviously, dialogue is not possible with such groups, but equally as certain an overreactive military response that causes a large number of innocent civilian deaths in a Muslim country could trigger precisely such an apocalyptic explosion of violence as was dreamed of by the fanatic terrorists. It would seem that such a retaliatory response was desired by the Bin Laden group which carried out the terrorist attacks on the U.S. Thus, to continue to attack Arab and Islamic countries could be to fall into the Bin Laden gang’s trap and play their game - with highly dangerous consequences.
Further, we need to reflect on the global economic, social, environmental and other consequences of promoting militarism and an era of warfare against terrorism. Evoking and fighting an “axis of evil” called for by the Bush administration is highly dangerous, irrational, and potentially apocalyptic. It is not clear that the global economy can survive constant disruption of warfare. Nor can the environment stand constant bombardment and warfare, when ecological survival is already threatened by unrestrained capitalist development (see Wilson 2002). To carry out continued military intervention, whether against an “axis of evil” or any country that is said to support terrorism by the Bush administration, risks apocalypse of the most frightening kind. The large-scale bombing of Iraq, Iran, or any Arab countries, could trigger an upheaval in Pakistan, or war with India, with conceivable turmoil in Saudi Arabia and other Moslem countries. It could also help produce a dangerous escalation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, already at a state of white-hot intensity, whose expansion could engulf the Middle East in flames.
Thus, while it is reasonable to deem international terrorism a deadly threat on a global scale and to take resolute action against terrorism, what is required is an intelligent multifaceted and multilateral response. This would require a diplomatic consensus that a global campaign against terrorism is necessary which requires the arrest of members of terrorist networks, the regulation of financial institutions that allow funds to flow to terrorists, the implementation of national security measures to protect citizens against terrorism, and the world-wide criminalization of terrorist networks that sets international, national, and local institutions against the terrorist threat. Some of these measures have already begun and the conditions are present to develop an effective and resolute global campaign against terrorism.
There is a danger, however, that excessive unilateral American military action would split a potential coalition, creating uncontrollable chaos that could destroy the global economy and create an era of apocalyptic war and misery such as Orwell evoked in 1984. We are living in a very dangerous period and must be extremely careful and responsible in appraising responses to the events of September 11 and other terrorist attacks bound to happen. This will require the mobilization of publics on a local, national, and global level to oppose both terrorism and militarism and to seek productive solutions to the social problems that generate terrorism, as well as to terrorism itself.
Consequently, while I would support a global campaign against terrorism, I believe that we cannot depend on war or large-scale military action to solve the problem of global terrorism. Terrorists should be criminalized and international and national institutions should go after terrorist networks and those who support them with the appropriate legal, financial, judicial, and political instruments. Before and during Bush administration military intervention in Afghanistan, an intelligent campaign was underway that had arrested many participants and supporters of the bin Laden and other terror networks, that had alerted publics throughout the world to the dangers of terrorism, and that had created the conditions of possibility for a global campaign against terror. But we need global movements and institutions to oppose purely militarist attacks on terrorism and that legitimate the suppression of democracy in the name of the war against terrorism.
I would also suggest that another lesson of September 11 is that it is now totally appropriate to be completely against terrorism, to use the term in the arsenal of critical social theory, and to declare it unacceptable and indefensible in the modern world. There was a time when it was argued that one person’s “terrorism” was another person’s “national liberation movement,” or “freedom fighter,” and that the term was thus an ideological concept not to be used by politically and theoretically correct discourse - a position that Reuters purportedly continues to follow.
In terms of modern/postmodern epistemological debates, I would argue against absolutism and universalism and for providing a contextual and historical account of terms like terrorism. There were times in history when “terrorism” was an arguably defensible tactic used by those engaged in struggles against fascism, such as in World War II, or in national liberation struggles, such as in the movements against oppressive European and later U.S. empire and colonialism. In the current situation, however, when terrorism is a clear and present danger to innocent civilians throughout the world, it seems unacceptable to advocate, carry out, or defend terrorism against civilian populations because of the lethality of modern weapons, the immorality of indiscriminate crime, and the explosiveness of the present situation when terror on one side could unleash genocidal, even species-cidal, terror as a retaliatory response.
It is therefore neither the time for terrorism nor reckless unilateral military intervention, but for a global campaign against terrorism that deploys all legal, political, and morally defensible means to destroy the network of terrorists responsible for the September 11 events, but also that is for democracy. Such a global response would put terrorist groups on warning that their activity will be strongly opposed, and that “terrorism” will be construed as a moral and political malevolence not to be accepted or defended. But a progressive global campaign should also not accept militarism, the erection of a police-military state, and the undermining of democracy in the name of fighting terrorism.
Thus, while I would support a global campaign against terrorism, especially the al Qaeda network, that could include military action under UN or other global auspices, I would not trust U.S. unilateral military action for reasons of U.S. failures in the region and its sustained history of supporting the most reactionary social forces (see Kellner, forthcoming). Indeed, one of the stakes of the current crisis, and of globalization itself, is whether the U.S. empire will come to dominate the world, or whether globalization will constitute a more democratic, cosmopolitan, pluralistic, and just world, without domination by hegemonic states or corporations. Now more than ever global institutions and movements are needed to deal with global problems and those who see positive potential in globalization should renounce all national solutions to the problem of terrorism and seek global ones. Consequently, while politicians like Bill Clinton and Colin Powell have deemed terrorism “the dark side of globalization,” it can also be seen as an unacceptable response to misguided and destructive imperial national policies which themselves must be transformed if a world without terror is possible.
Finally, this will require the anti-globalization movement to rethink its nature, agenda, and goals. There may well be a “clash of civilizations” occurring today between the globalizing forces of transnational capital and resistance to global capitalism by heterogeneous configurations of individuals, groups, and social movements. But in its first stages the movement against capitalist globalization tended to be defined more by what it was against than what it was for, hence, the common term “anti-globalization movement.” A new social movement for the millennium must, however, define itself by what it is for as well as against. In the wake of September 11, I am suggesting that local, national, and global democratic movements should be for democracy, peace, environmentalism, and social justice and against war, militarism, and terrorism, as well as the multiplicity of injustices that social movements are currently fighting. Now, more than ever, we are living in a global world and need new global movements and politics to address global problems and achieve global solutions.
Barber, Benjamin R. (1995) Jihad vs. McWorld. New York: Ballatine Books.
Chomsky, Noam (2001) 9-11. New York: Seven Seals Press.
Cooley, John (2000) Unholy Wars. Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism. London: Pluto Press.
Friedman, Thomas (1999) The Lexus and the Olive Tree. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux.
Fukuyama, Francis (1992) The End of History. New York:
Huntington, Samuel (1996) The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Touchstone Books.
Johnson, Chalmers (2000) Blowback. The Costs and Consequences of American Empire. New York: Henry Holt.
Kellner, Douglas (2001) Grand Theft 2000. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield.
Rashid, Ahmed (2000) Taliban. Militant Islam, Oil & Fundamentalism in Central Asia. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Notes
[1]Fukujama’s 1992 book was an expansion of a 1989 article published in the conservative journal The National Interest. His texts generated a tremendous amount of controversy and were seen by some as a new dominant ideology proclaiming the triumph of Western ideals of capitalism and democracy over all off their opponents. With a quasi-Hegelian gloss, Fukuyama thus proclaimed the victory of the Ideas of neo-Liberalism and the “end of history,” and his work prompted both skepticism (“it ain’t over, til its over”) and impassioned critique. If terrorism and the Bush administration militarism soon pass from the historical scene and a neo-liberal globalization driven by market capitalism and democracy returns to become the constitutive force of the new millennium, Fukuyama would end up being vindicated after all, but in the current conflictual situation his views appear off the mark and irrelevant to the present situation.
[2] I provide my own historical and theoretical account of the background to the events of September 11 in the text cited in Note 1. Put abstractly, such a theory would combine the Hegelian-Marxian perspectives of a globalized world and the vicissitudes of capitalism and the contemporary era with concrete historical study of specific events, like the September 11 terrorist acts and the lessons for contemporary social theory and democratic politics.
[3] In addition to Johnson 2000 that I am utilizing to provide a conceptual overview of the concept of blowback that I am using to interpret the September 11 terrorist acts, I am also drawing upon a series of studies of U.S. foreign policy and Afghanistan, including Mary Ann Weaver, “Blowback,” Atlantic Monthly (May 1996), available at www.theatlantic.com/issues/96may/blowback.htm; a collection of articles contextualizing the events at The Nation web site, especially Dilip Hiro, “The Cost of an Afghan ‘Victory,’” at www.thenation.com; articles collected at www.counterpoint.com; and a variety of books and articles that I will cite as I proceed.
[4] See Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, “The Price. Was it Really Worth it, Mrs. Albright?“ Counterpoint, September 26, 2001. See their archive for useful daily postings on the current crisis at http://www.counterpunch.org/wtcarchive.html.
[5] The 1998 Le Monde interview with Brzezinski is posted October 8, 2001 at http://www.counterpunch.org/wtcarchive.html. For a full account of the background of the Brezezinski-Carter decision to intervene in Afghanistan politics and the Soviet response, see Cooley 2000: 9ff.
[6] According to one account, it was “irrational hatred” of Sudan by the Clinton administration that prevented the West from gaining access to Sudan’s detailed files on al Qaeda, which they were reportedly willing to share with the West, but which were repeatedly refused; see David Rose, "Resentful west spurned Sudan’s key terror files,” Guardian, Sept. 30, 2001 and “The Osama Files,” Vanity Fair (Jan. 2002: 64ff). Rose especially blames Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright who reportedly blocked the FBI from gaining the Sudan files, on the grounds that Sudan was a “terrorist state.” Three days later, the Clinton administration bombed Sudan in retaliation for the al Qaeda bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa. A Clinton administration member, Gayle Smith, however, claims that the Sudanese were not serious about sharing their intelligence files and did not provide any useful information on the Bin Laden group (see Los Angeles Times (Dec. 7, 2001: B15). A twisted, tortured tale of failed U.S. policy in the region remains to be told.
[7] According to Hatfield (2000: 56), Bush denied ever doing business with Bath, with whom he had served in the Texas National Guard and was reportedly good friends, after Bath’s shady business deals were exposed; but inspection of later court papers revealed that Bath indeed invested in Bush’s Arbusto oil company, along with the bin Laden family. Bush senior has also had longtime relations with members of the bin Laden family and other Saudis who provided money to the bin Laden network. For Bath’s colorful story, including business and bank scandals and illegal support for the contras, and alleged recruitment into the CIA by George Bush, senior, see Brewton 1992.
[8] Sally Slate’s explosive column is available, http://www.onlinejournal.com/Commentary/Slate103001/slate103001.html; the PBS Frontline commentary is at http://www.pbs. org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/binladen/who/family.html. For the official bin Laden family position that Osama is an outcast, see Michael Moss, “Bin Laden Family Strives to Re-establish Its Reputation,” New York Times (Oct. 28, 2001). The long-time and complex Bush family/bin Laden and Saudi connection is obviously one of the stories of the millennium (along with the Bush-Cheney-Enron story), and the sooner it is unraveled the better the human race’s quickly diminishing chances for survival will be as the Bush’s and bin Laden’s drive us ever closer to global catastrophe. On the October Surprise which emerges along with Grand Theft 2000 as a axial event of the past decades which has shaped an increasingly frightening present, see the sources assembled in Kellner 2001, the book on the treasonous episode by Sick 1990, and the dossier of materials assembled by Robert Parry at www.consortiumnews.com.
[9] See note 8 for the source; the tape of Saudis clerics visiting Bin Laden that was found in Afghanistan and released to great fanfare and controversy in December 2001 documents the strong support for Bin Laden in Saudi Arabia, an issue I discuss later.
[10] In the Southeast Asian press, there are speculations that the U.S. policy in Afghanistan under Bush II was to stabilize the country under Taliban rule to enable the UNCOL-corporation to build a gas pipe-line across Afghanistan and exploit its potential natural gas and oil resources. See Ranjit Devrag who writes:
Where the
"great game" in Afghanistan was once about czars and commissars
seeking access to the warm water ports of the Persian Gulf, today it is about
laying oil and gas pipelines to the untapped petroleum reserves of Central
Asia. According to testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives in March
1999 by the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation, Azerbaijan,
Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan together have 15 billion barrels of
proven oil reserves. The same countries also have proven gas deposits totaling
not less than nine trillion cubic meters. Another study by the Institute for
Afghan Studies placed the total worth of oil and gas reserves in the Central
Asian republics at around U.S.$3 trillion at last year's prices.
Not only can Afghanistan play a role in hosting pipelines connecting Central
Asia to international markets, but the country itself has significant oil and
gas deposits. During the Soviets' decade-long occupation of Afghanistan, Moscow
estimated Afghanistan's proven and probable natural gas reserves at around five
trillion cubic feet and production reached 275 million cubic feet per day in
the mid-1970s. But sabotage by anti-Soviet mujahideen (freedom fighters) and by rival groups in the civil
war that followed Soviet withdrawal in 1989 virtually closed down gas
production and ended deals for the supply of gas to several European countries.
Natural gas production and distribution under Afghanistan's Taliban rulers is
the responsibility of the Afghan Gas Enterprise which, in 1999, began repair of
a pipeline to Mazar-i-Sharif city. Afghanistan's proven and probable oil and
condensate reserves were placed at 95 million barrels by the Soviets. So far,
attempts to exploit Afghanistan's petroleum reserves or take advantage of its
unique geographical location as a crossroads to markets in Europe and South
Asia have been thwarted by the continuing civil strife.
In 1998, the California-based UNOCAL, which held 46.5 percent stakes in Central
Asia Gas (CentGas), a consortium that planned an ambitious gas pipeline across
Afghanistan, withdrew in frustration after several fruitless years. The
pipeline was to stretch 1,271km from Turkmenistan's Dauletabad fields to Multan
in Pakistan at an estimated cost of $1.9 billion. An additional $600 million
would have brought the pipeline to energy-hungry India.
From OnLine Asia Times, October 6, 2001
(http://atimes.com/global-econ/CJ06Dj01.html).
[11] See the assembled documents from various sources including the Wall Street Journal and New York Times that document Bush Senior’s connection with the Carlyle group (www.bushwatch.com) and the recent article by Oliver Burkeman and Julian Borger, “The ex-president’s club,” Guardian (October 31, 2001).
[12] See Greg Palast, “FBI and U.S. Spy Agents Say Bush Spiked Bin Laden Probes Before September 11.” The Guardian (Nov. 7, 2001). Palast’s article is collected on his home page that has a lot of other interesting articles; see www.gregpalast.com.
[13] See Wayne Madsen, “Afghanistan, the Taliban, and the Bush Oil Team” who claims that Afghanistan interim president Hamid Karzai was a top adviser to the Unocal Corporation interested in the Central Asian Gas pipeline, that Enron did the feasibility study for the project, that Cheney’s Halliburton company was set to do the construction work, and that the Bush administration top representative in Afghanistan today, Zalymay Zhalilzad, had also been a Unocal adviser and see member of the Bush administration GOP (Grand Oil Plan) (see democrats.com [January 2002] and hhtp://globalresearch.ca/articles/MAD201A.html.
[14] Rightwingers claim that anyone who mentions political causes of Arab hostility toward the U.S. is part of the “blame America” crowd, while even liberals resist the “blowback” thesis as illicitly blaming the victim. It is rather a question, I would argue, first, of gaining historical understanding of the context and situation concerning those radical Islamic sectors of the Arab and Islamic world who now are declaring war against the U.S. Secondly, it is a question of ascribing responsibility for those in the U.S. foreign policy establishment who helped organize, fund, train, and arm the terrorists now plaguing the U.S. If we do not understand the past not only are we condemned to repeat it, but we have no chance of constructing an intelligent, enlightened, and peaceful future.
[15] In the following section I am indebted to students of my UCLA Cultural Studies seminar and to Richard Kahn who developed a website where the class posted material relating to the September 11 events and Afghan war; the following student draws on this material that can be found at:
[16] For the astonishing story of the Bush gang election theft, see Kellner 2001 which also cites documents grounding the thumbnail sketch of Bush’s life presented above. All of these stories are well-documented in websites like www.bushwatch.com, as well as a series of books that I draw upon in Kellner 2001, but the mainstream media prefer to neglect the more unsavory aspects of the life and times of George W. Bush, in favor of puff pieces on the rascal.
[17] In a October 5, 2001, Wall Street Journal editorial Rush Limbaugh wrote: "Mr. Clinton can be held culpable for not doing enough when he was commander in chief to combat the terrorists who wound up attacking the World Trade Center and Pentagon." Shortly thereafter, Limbaugh confessed that he was almost fully deaf and had been feigning dialogue on his radio show all year. On rightwing attempts to blame Clinton for the terrorist attacks, see John F. Harris “Conservatives Sound Refrain: It's Clinton's Fault,“ The Washington Post, October 7, 2001: A15.
[18] Shortly after this and other outbursts, the frothing Coulter was fired from National Review when she reacted violently to efforts to tone down her rhetoric by the editors, helping to provide her with martyr status for the U.S. Talibanites.
[19] The Bush-Baker-Carlyle connection was documented in many English newspapers, the New York Times, and other sources, collected on www.bushwatch.com and Phil Agre’s Red Rock Eater list collected at http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/people/pagre/rre.html.
[20] In the following sections, I draw upon daily reading of several major U.S. and British newspapers on the Afghan war, lists of articles collected at www.bushwatch.com, www.buzzflash.com and Phil Agre’s frequent posting of articles on his Red Rock Eater list, collected at http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/people/pagre/rre.html.
[21] See “Floridians Stockpile Anthrax Antibiotics” and “Bioterrorism Jitters Close Subway Stop, IRS Center,” Los Angles Times (October 10, 2001: A3).
[22] “Jitters,” The New Yorker (Oct 29, 2001). Rice’s suggestion that U.S. television censorship would help fight the bin Laden network is ludicrous as any interested parties could receive such messages from the Internet, or through the broadcasts of Arabic-language and other overseas media. On the other hand, there are good reasons not to broadcast live the bin Laden messages since instant translation is atrocious and the communiques require context and commentary to make sense to Western audiences. But the Bush administration failed to make sensible arguments to the networks who cravenly went along with their political masters’ instructions and intensified the propagandistic context of their programming for good measure.
[23] Paul Krugman, who had written an excellent book on Bush’s “fuzzy math” (2001), exposing the fradulent numbers used by the Bush administration in pushing through its tax-give-away to the rich, continued to argue that Bush administration economic policy was using the war hysteria to push through its economic programs that amounted to corporate bailouts and tax give-aways to the rich. See “Another Useful Crisis,” New York Times (Nov. 11, 2001) and “Other People’s Money,” New York Times (Nov. 14, 2001).
[24] See Julian Borger, “Pentagon split over war plan,” The Guardian (Oct. 15, 2001); Seymour Hersh, “King’s Ransom,” The New Yorker (Oct. 22, 2001); “Millions at Risk in Afghan Crisis,” BBC News (Oct. 14, 2001); and Zeeshan Haider, “Stench of death in a flattened village” Guardian (Oct. 15, 2001).
[25] See Said Aburish, “The coming Arab crash,” The Guardian, October 18, 2001.
[26] See Laura Miller’s interview with Laurie Garrett, “The First Line of Defense,” Salon (Oct. 17, 2001) and Carlos Bongioanni, “Expert picks apart government’s handling of anthrax investigations,” Stars and Stripes Oct. 16, 2001). The latter attacks the governments’ tardiness in investigating the first anthrax attack in Florida and incompetence in handling the later New York media anthrax exposures.
[27] I will discuss in detail Ashcroft’s Jihad against civil liberties below. The muddle over both the military and domestic situation was noted throughout the media on October 17 and 18 with critical articles appearing in the Washington Post, New York Times, and other major newspapers who called for clarification of domestic threats from the secretive Bush administration; see, for example, Todd S. Purdum, “Information, Please,” New York Times (Oct. 16, 2001). Honorable conservatives and liberals were extremely worried about the assault on civil liberties that were beginning in mid-October.
[28] “Afghan survivors recounts bombings. Civilian deaths turn them against U.S.”, Chicago Tribune (Oct. 27, 2001).
[29] The BBC lead off its October 24 newscast with a detailed report of deaths from the unexploded cluster bombs in an Afghan village, but the U.S. TV networks and wire services ignored the story until the New York Times published reports the next day, “Errant Cluster Bomb Leaves Danger Behind, U.N. Says” and “U.S. Hits Taliban Stronghold; Cluster Bomb Toll Climbs to 9.” The use of this highly controversial munition shows the Bush administration arrogance and disregard for world public opinion.
[30] See “Pentagon: Afghan village a ‘legitimate target’” (www.cnn.com, Nov. 2, 2001). CNN reported that an anonymous U.S. military source told it that: “We hit what we wanted to hit” and that the village was “a Taliban encampment.” Residents of the village, however, said that the convoy consisted of people escaping the bombing of Kandahar. In the fog of war, the truth is hard to see, but clearly the bombing of civilians was becoming a public relations disaster for the U.S. throughout much of the world.
[31] See Jason Burke, “Desperate call from the valley of death: ‘Help usŠ’” Guardian (Oct. 28, 2001). There were also many reports that the CIA had failed to adequately support Haq, that they had “hung him out to dry,” and his death was attributed in part to CIA incompetency.
[32] See Thomas E. Ricks and Vernon Loeb, “Quiet Commander in the Hot Seat. Franks Criticized on Pace of War,” Washington Post (Nov. 9, 2001) and “Splits Open in UK-U.S. Alliance,” TG (Nov. 9, 2001).
[33] Dexter Filkins, “Taliban’s Foes say Bombing is Poorly Aimed and Futile,” New York Times (Nov. 2, 2001).
[34] Sir Michael Howard’s speech was published on www.thisislondon.com on October 31 and was widely distributed on the Internet.
[35] R.W. Apple, Jr., “Afghanistan as Vietnam,” New York Times, October 31, 2001; the Perle quote is from Jason Vest, “Bush’s War Hawk,” The American Prospect (Nov. 5, 2001); and on the CIA failure, “Doubts grow over U.S. war strategy,” The Times, October 27, 2001;
[36] See David Firestone, “The Leader in Airport Security, and in Lapses,” New York Times (Nov. 9, 2001).
[37] “Don’t swap one evil for another. Northern Alliance is not the answer,” The Observer, Nov. 11, 2001.
[38] Totally triumphalist stories on November 11 include Dexter Filkins, “With One Prize in Hand, Afghan Rebels Press On,” New York Times and William Branigan, “Jubliant Afghan Fighters Set Sights on Kabul. A Los Angeles Times story “Taliban Forces Retreat After Rebel Assaults,” by contrast, described a bloody fight still going on in Mazar-i-Sharif with more than 1,000 Taliban holdouts fighting on. Yet another story by Doug Struck claimed “Taliban Allies Lost in Strange City” (Washington Post, Nov. 11) and that trapped Pakistani volunteers were abandoned by their Taliban allies who had fled the country and were being arrested or killed. When the fog of war clears, both accounts might turn out to have been true, or not. On the Sunday morning talk shows, Bush administration and Pentagon officials were being cautious in describing Northern Alliance progress. Later reports from Northern Alliance and other sources suggest that the hundreds of young Pakistanis trapped in a school were slaughtered.
[39] In a revealing story in the Washington Post (Nov. 11, 2001), Steven Mufson and Thomas E. Ricks noted “New Front Illustrates Evolving Strategy.” The article cites military planners and commentators who admit that the first phase of the U.S. bombing campaign was ineffective and undirected, and that only by getting U.S. forces on the ground did they have adequate intelligence, eventually evolving a strategy resulting in success in the taking of Mazar-i-Sharif. A rightwing spin on the story was provided by conservative Armchair Generals William Kristol and Robert Kagan (National Standard, Nov. x, 2001). Generals Kristol and Kagan blame the slow pace and apparent failure of the first month of the U.S. bombing campaign on Colin Powell’s State Department, which supposedly failed to trust the Northern Alliance and was too concerned with Pakistan and world public opinion to unleash a virile enough bombing campaign. Then, the True Men in the Pentagon led by Big Don Rumsfeld took over, bombed the hell out of the Taliban, and the Northern Alliance kicked their ass. Kagan and Kristol’s narrative is complexified, however, by the fact that the Pentagon itself repeatedly distrusted the Northern Alliance, admitted to insiders that its bombing targets were flawed because of poor intelligence, and that it simply needed time to come up with a coherent plan. Kagan/Kristol’s ideological goal was to discredit their increasingly bitter enemy Colin Powell and to urge the unleashing of the Wild Warriors of the Pentagon to wage Jihad forever, until every nation that supports, or has ever supported, terrorism is destroyed. Another armchair warrior, ferocious “realist” Jim Hoagland of the Washington Post urged in a column “Don’t Lose Sight of the Quarry” (Nov. 16, 2001), that with the apparent rout of the Taliban, the U.S. should not forget that its “national interests” are at stake and that it must go after all of the Evil Terrorist Empire, in “plain language, that means Iraq.” For starters.
[40] Oliver Burkeman, “Simpson of Kabul” (Guardian, Nov. 14, 2001). Simpson announced that “It was only BBC people who liberated this city. We got in ahead of Northern Alliance troops.” An ITN reporter found himself riding into the city on a Northern Alliance tank driven by the tank commanders 11-year old son and took over control himself according to an ITN spokeswoman; see Jessica Hodgson, “’BBC liberated Kabul’ says Simpson” ” (Guardian, Nov. 14, 2001).
[41] See Matt Wells, “Al-Jazeera accuses U.S. of bombing its Kabul office,” Guardian (Nov. 17, 2001). One of the al Jazeera reporters in Kabul, who had just left the office before the missile hit, tells of how he was beaten by anti-Taliban Afghans and forced to flee for his life (Reuters, Nov. 15, 2001). The New York Times Sunday Magazine contained a long story by Fouad Ajami, “What the Muslim World is Watching” (Nov. 18, 2001).
[42] An article in Salon (Nov. 9, 2001) reported that according to a survey by Jupiter Media Metrix, the British Guardian’s online site was attracting 600,000 American readers a day, while the conservative Daily Telegraph cited had gained 500,000 visitors since September 11. As I indicate throughout, I learned much more about the Afghan war through my daily scrutiny of British newspapers and TV than by reading U.S. papers, who had many fewer reporters in the field than the Brits and U.S. television that had degenerated into a propaganda apparatus.
[43] “War May be Costing $500M-$1B a Month,” Associated Press, Nov. 1, 2001 and “U.S. Is Expecting to Spend $1 Billion a Month on War,” New York Times, Nov. 12, 2001. An earlier AP article “U.S. Will Have Favors to Return” (Oct. 9, 2001) notes that in return for the support of Pakistan, the three neighboring “stan” former Soviet Republics, Turkey, and other countries, the U.S. would have to pay out billions in foreign aide grants, as they were indeed promising to do, as had done in the Gulf War. The Nov. 12 AP article opens by stating: “A U.S. helicopter lost in Afghanistan a week ago cost up to twice as much as the government spends yearly on scenic byways. Each cruise missile is worth several American homes.” How long would such insanity and obscenity continue?
[44] Defense of Civilization Fund, “Defending Civilization: How Our Universities are Failing America and What Can Be Done About It?” (November 2001; accessible at www.goacta.org). Lynne Cheney and her rightwing allies had long dreamed of crushing radical voices of dissent in the University and had long waged a cultural war against their academic enemies. The conservative Jihad was launched during the Reagan era when Ms. Cheney was head of the NEH which she governed like a Taliban, rooting out all politically incorrect material. There were some speculations that the U.S. left/right culture wars were suspended in favor of national unity against terrorism, but obviously Cheney and her Taliban were not going to miss a chance to go after their long-time adversaries.
[45] See Tony Capaccio, “Missile Defense Early Warning Systems in Disarray, Panel Says,” Bloomberg News (Nov. 7, 2001). A study by the House Appropriations Committee indicated that the cost of a new system of early warning satellites has soared and its heat-seeking sensors that are critical to detecting enemy missile launches don’t work.
[46] It was claimed in many Internet sources that some of the “plans” for nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction found in the Al Qaeda headquarters were taken from an Internet spoof site; see James Ridgeway, The Village Voice, Nov. x, 2001 and David Cassel, “Phoney Bomb Humor Fools Taliban?” Alternet, Nov. 19, 2001.
[47] An article by Ben Barber, “The Taliban’s deadly ‘refugees’” presented the refugee camps along the Afghan-Pakistan border as havens for fleeing Taliban guerrillas who were using the camps to recruit new fighters, for medical services, and as a home base. Salon, Nov. 22, 2001.
[48] A New York Times story by Dexter Filkins, “Taliban Foes Say Kunduz is Theirs,” on November 26, 2001 suggested that indeed the Pakistanis had flown in and taken out some of its citizens, although it was not sure why the Pentagon had allowed the Pakistanis to take out their troops when the U.S. had made it clear that they did not want free passage for radical Islamic fighters to make trouble elsewhere. There were also reports that many Pakistanis had fled Kunduz and escaped across the border back into Pakistan.
[49] See Phillip Robertson, “All Crazy on the Kunduz front” Salon, November 29, 2001, for an account of his efforts to visit the town of Choge Nawabad where he confirmed that U.S. bombing raids had acccidently hit a village, killing whole families and at least twelve.
[50] See Justin Huggler, “Kunduz falls, and a bloody vengeance is,” and Patrick Cockburn, “Alliance struggles to end bloody uprising at fortress jail,” Independent (Nov. 27, 2001); Rory Mcarthy and Nicholas Watt, “Alliance accused of brutality in capture of Kunduz,” Guardian (Nov. 27, 2001)’ Dexter Filkins, “In Kunduz, a Deathly Peace Settles In,” New York Times, (Nov. 27, 2001), and Paul Richter, Maura Reynolds, and Peter Gosselin’s reports in the Los Angeles Times (Nov. 27, 2001).
[51] The transcript of the call between the Time reporter on the scene and his editor was published in www.drudgereport.com on Nov. 26 and the report was later published in Time, Nov. xx, 2001; for other accounts, see Oliver August, “CIA Blunder sparked Taleban revolt that became a mass suicide,” The Times, Nov. 28, 2001; Carlotta Gall, “Alliance Declares Revolt Is Crushed,” New York Times, Nov. 28, 2001; and overviews of the aftermath of the prison battles in Matthew Campbell, “The fort of hell,” The Times, Dec. 2, 2001. Interesting epistemological issues arise in the unfolding of the story, as wildly different accounts appeared on the origin and reasons for the prison revolt, its unfolding, the killing of the U.S. CIA officer, and the quelling of the revolt. Sources included various on the scene journalists, Northern Alliance troops, and other on-site observers. Interest in the American Taliban, John Walker, who emerged from the battle will no doubt continue to focus attention on the uprising and it will be interesting to see what reports emerge on the incident and its aftermath.
[52] The interview, broadcast by CNN, was carried out by Robert Pelton, described as an “author of adventure books.” In a later story on the interview by Cynthia Cotts, “Midnight Confession,” Village Voice (Jan. 2-8, 2002), Pelton later told CNN that he was staying with notorious Northern Alliance commander Abdul Dostum when Walker and other Taliban fighters were captured after the prison uprising. Pelton informed CNN that Walker was “dazed and confused” and “didn’t even know where he was.” Initially, he was hostile to Pelton and refused an interview, but when Pelton arranged medical treatment, including morphine, Walker began talking in a videotaped conversation, taken as his “confession.” Cotts notes that Walker had not consented to the videotaping and its distribution and had resisted an interview until he was administered the drugs. Thus, in her view, the tape was highly manipulative, setting up Walker as a traitor, although would have ambiguous status as a legal document, given the circumstances of its production.
[53] See Andrew Sullivan, “Parallel lives: The CIA man and the Taliban fighter from California,” Sunday Times (Dec. 16, 2001). Sullivan’s ludicrous dichotomy was undermined by the release of the videotape of Spann interviewing Walker, where rather than exhibiting cool professionalism, Spann was completely incompetent in interviewing Walker, missed that he was an American and potentially valuable intelligence asset, and then was seized by Taliban and Al Qaeda forces who killed him as they began a prison uprising that caused a rash of deaths and injuries on all sides. Not exactly your all-American hero, nor should Walker be seen as an all-American villain until more facts are in.
[54] Rowan Scarborough, “Special forces get free rein,” The Washington Times (Nov. 23, 2001) and Michael Evans, “Delta Force ‘has killed hundreds’” (The [London] Times (Nov. 24, 2001). The latter quoted an U.S. official saying that “From the reports I have seen, they have killed in the hundreds and there have been no deaths on our side.” An UPI report that I cited earlier, however, claimed that Bush administration officials admitted that at least 40-50 U.S. Special Ops forces had been killed in the fighting and that the U.S. had decided not to acknowledge Special Ops deaths, thus it was really impossible to know the true U.S. casualty count.
[55] Frank Rich, “Wait Until Dark,” New York Times (Nov. 24, 2001). Rich correctly noted that “this kind of high-handedness and secrecy has been a hallmark of the [Bush] administration beginning Jan. 20, not Sept 11,” citing Cheney’s secret meetings with big energy corporations to help construct energy policy, while refusing Congressional requests to clarify his meetings; having a secret commission on Social Security reform; and signing executive orders blocking access to presidential papers. Secrecy and conspiracy have long been trademarks of the Bush family and Cheney. For other criticisms of U.S. anti-terror policy, see Anthony Lewis, “Right and Wrong,” New York Times, Nov. 24, 2001; BBC News, “Criticism of U.S. anti-terror efforts grows, (Nov. 20, 2001); and many other commentary, circulated through www.bushwatch.com, www.buzzflash.com, and Phil Agre’s Red Rock Eater list. Mainstream television on the whole ignored the dangerous erosion of civil liberties, although the issue was discussed in BBC and Canadian TV.
[56] Maureen Dowd, “Uncivil Liberties,” New York Times, Nov. 25, 2001. Usually Dowd and the liberals could be counted on to provide critique of the worst assaults of the Bush administration against civil liberties and the open society, but in the war hysteria they too surrendered, leaving but a few honorable people to defend civil liberties and rights under assault by the Bush administration.
[57] This hypothesis was suggested by an article by William J. Broad and Judith Miller, “Anthrax Inquiry Looks at U.S. Labs,” New York Times (Dec. 2, 2001). The article explores the hypothesis set forth by Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, an expert in biological weapons, who believes that the grade of anthrax produced suggests a “knowledgeable insider,” someone who had worked in U.S. biological weapons labs or had access to its high-grade material. The article indicates also that the FBI is currently investigating government labs and its contractors.
[58] The Washington Post headlined its story by Dana Milbank on the Bush power grab “Bush Exercizes Executive Muscle,” describing Bush’s assault on democracy as if it was a weight-lifting routine (Dec. 13, 2001).
[59] In a stunning display of pure mendacity, Bush’s buffoonish spinmeister Karl Rove told the American Enterprise Institute in a December talk that Bush was “never a unilateralist.” I have documented in Grand Theft 2000 (Kellner 2001) Bush’s succession of unilateralist gestures during his first months in office, ranging from rejection of the Kyoto environmental treaty to renunciation of several major weapons treaties. The Bush administration leaked to the press before the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan why they did not want coalition partners to restrain their military activity and seemed determined to go it alone in a continuing war on terror against a large list of designated targets including Iraq.
[60] C.J. Chivers, “400 Experts Try to Harvest Afghanistan’s Field of Mines,” New York Times, Dec. 18. Bush Administration official Kenton Keith claimed that while “The coalition did not creat this problem, we will step forward to help Afghanistan deal with it.” Chivers comments: “Some Afghans took exception to those assertions, noting that the United States sent billions of dollars of arms and military aid through Pakistan into Afghanistan in the 1980's to assist the guerrilla resistance to the Soviets. The aid included mines and explosives training, several former guerrillas said. Mr. Keith also did not acknowledge the problem of unexploded American bombs, which in places are thick.” And the head of Halo Trust was highly critical of the use of cluster bombs, that were roughly the same color and size of food supplies, leading to many injuries.
[61] By January 6, 2001, over 27 young arsonists, dubbed “Lucifers” by the local press, had been questioned or charged of arson. There were also reports that Sydney police were in pursuit of a mysterious “phantom,” a “sinister backwoodman,” believed to be the source of many of the fires that had now ravaged the Sydney area; see Sunday Times (Jan. 6, 2002).
[62] See Suzanne Goldenberg, “Day 100: another raid in the bombing war without end.” The Guardian, Jan. 15, 2002. The story documents the cycle of U.S. bombing of Zhawar during 2002, complaints by the local residents, and claims that villages and civilians had been bombed who had nothing to do with Al Qaeda or the Taliban.
[63] There was little detailed analysis of the defunding of the INC in the U.S. press; see, however, “Iraq exiles accused of wasting $2m aid,” The Times (Jan. 26, 2002) which describes the group known as “Gucci guerillas” whose “members spend more time at its Knightsbridge headquarters than opposing Saddam’s forces on the ground.”
[64] See the report from northern Afghanistan by Ravi Newssman, “Afghans eat grass as aid fails to arrive” (Guardian, Jan. 9, 2002) and Medea Benjamin, “Feeding the Hungry May Be the Prime Task of Peacekeepers,” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Dec. 16, 2001, on the tasking of feeding the hungary and providing adequate shelter throughout the country.
[65] See note 63 below and”Arroyo under fire for U.S. special forces deployment in Philippines,” Yahoo News (Jan. 16, 2002).
[66] The close connection between the Bush-Baker clique and Enron has been documented by honorable conservative Kevin Phillips, one of the few Republicans to speak out against Bush gang corruption. See “The Company Presidency. Enron and the Bush family have boosted each other up the ladder of success. But have their ties created a Teapot Dome?” Los Angeles Times, Feb. 10, 2002: M1,6).
[67] For the insider trading allegations, widely circulated in the Texas press during Bush’s first run for governor against Ann Richards, see Hatfield 2000 and Ivins and Dubose 2000; for an update on the story by investigative reporter Knut Royce, released on the Center for Public Integrity website, see “Bush’s Insider Connections Preceded Huge Profit on Stock Deal,” www.public-i.org/story_01_040400.htm.
[68] See note 58 above and Eric Schmitt, “U.S. Says Tribal Leaders Balk at Aiding Search for Taliban,” New York Times (Jan. 17, 2002).
[69] See for example, Terry Jones, “Spare our blushes and put a sack on it” (Guardian, Jan. 6, 2002); Mary Robinson, “Denying captives rights will return to haunt us,” Independent (Jan. 19, 2002); “It is shameful for Britain to support the degradation of these terrorist suspects,” Donald Macintyre, “Why Mr Blair must make an urgent call to the President,” and Robert Fiske, “Congratulations, America. You have made Bin Laden a happy man,” Independent (Jan. 22, 2001); and Terry Waite, “Justice or revenge?” Guardian (Jan. 23, 2002). In a press conference after this volley of criticism, Donald Rumsfeld, U.S. Secretary of Defense aggressively defended the indefensible U.S. policy and mocked its critics, intensifying in turn criticism in the British press of the “Rumsfeld problem.”
[70] See “Camp X-Ray row threatens first British split with U.S.,” Guardian (Jan. 22, 2001, “Camp X-Ray could split allies, The Times, Jan. 21, 2001 and the editorials cited in note 59 above. By contrast, U.S. cable television talk shows attacked criticism of the U.S. detainee camp and defended U.S. policy, showing the extent to which sectors of the U.S. public were falling prey to the New Barbarism.
[71] See Katty Kay, “U.S. ‘will send most detainees home,’” The Times (Jan. 23, 2001see Katharine Q. Seelye, “Powell Asks Bush to Reverse Stand on War Captives,” New York Times (Jan. 27, 2002).
[72] While British and other foreign media had published articles clarifying the “legalities” of POW detention and the Geneva convention for weeks, with many experts criticizing U.S. policy, it wasn’t until January 29 that the New York Times published articles quoting the precise Geneva conventions and definitions of prisoners of war in question and offering on Op Ed piece criticizing Bush administration policy. See Nicolas Kristof, “Let them Be P.O.W.s”. Kristoff argued that it was in U.S. interests to defend international law, the Geneva conventions, and treat the prisoners according to those norms to help assure protection of U.S. troops or citizens under similar conditions.
[73] Budget analysts noted that that although it was claimed on page 396 of Bush’s budget that the 2002 deficit would be $106 billion, on page 417 it is admitted that “the amount of government debt outstanding at the end of this year will rise by fully $367 billion to a new world record of $6.1 trillion.” Thomas Oliphant, Boston Globe (Feb. 12, 2002). When Senator Fritz Hollings confronted Bush administration budget director Mitch Daniels with this discrepancy Daniels admitted that “we hid it but you found it.” According to Oliphant, the Bush administration plans to help cover the gargantuan deficit by raiding Social Security and Medicare.
[74] See Seumas Milne, “Can the U.S. be defeated” (Guardian, Feb. 14, 2002).
[75] See http:// makethemaccountable.com/whatwhen/index.html).
[76] A videotape of Mrs. Lay’s testimony was available on http://www.ifilm.com/ in February 2002 under the rubric “Enron Crocodile Tears.”