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Amnesty International Annual Lecture -- Hosted by Trinity College

Professor Noam Chomsky

"War on Terror"

Venue: Shelbourne Hall, RDS, Dublin -- 18th January 2006

"Terror" is a term that rightly arouses strong emotions and deep
concerns. The primary concern should, naturally, be to take measures to
alleviate the threat, which has been severe in the past, and will be
even more so in the future. To proceed in a serious way, we have to
establish some guidelines. Here are a few simple ones:

(1) Facts matter, even if we do not like them.

(2) Elementary moral principles matter, even if they have consequences
that we would prefer not to face.

(3) Relative clarity matters. It is pointless to seek a truly precise
definition of "terror," or of any other concept outside of the hard
sciences and mathematics, often even there. But we should seek enough
clarity at least to distinguish terror from two notions that lie
uneasily at its borders: aggression and legitimate resistance.

If we accept these guidelines, there are quite constructive ways to
deal with the problems of terrorism, which are quite severe. It's
commonly claimed that critics of ongoing policies do not present
solutions. Check the record, and I think you will find that there is an
accurate translation for that charge: "They present solutions, but I
don't like them."
Suppose, then, that we accept these simple guidelines. Let's turn to
the "War on Terror."

Since facts matter, it matters that the War was not declared by George
W. Bush on 9/11, but by the Reagan administration 20 years earlier.
They came into office declaring that their foreign policy would
confront what the President called "the evil scourge of terrorism,"
a plague spread by "depraved opponents of civilization itself" in
"a return to barbarism in the modern age" (Secretary of State George
Shultz). The campaign was directed to a particularly virulent form of
the plague: state-directed international terrorism. The main focus was
Central America and the Middle East, but it reached to southern Africa
and Southeast Asia and beyond.

A second fact is that the war was declared and implemented by pretty
much the same people who are conducting the re-declared war on
terrorism. The civilian component of the re-declared War on Terror is
led by John Negroponte, appointed last year to supervise all
counterterror operations. As Ambassador in Honduras, he was the
hands-on director of the major operation of the first War on Terror,
the contra war against Nicaragua launched mainly from US bases in
Honduras. I'll return to some of his tasks. The military component of
the re-declared War led by Donald Rumsfeld. During the first phase of
the War on Terror, Rumsfeld was Reagan's special representative to
the Middle East. There, his main task was to establish close relations
with Saddam Hussein so that the US could provide him with large-scale
aid, including means to develop WMD, continuing long after the huge
atrocities against the Kurds and the end of the war with Iran. The
official purpose, not concealed, was Washington's responsibility to
aid American exporters and "the strikingly unanimous view" of
Washington and its allies Britain and Saudi Arabia that "whatever the
sins of the Iraqi leader, he offered the West and the region a better
hope for his country's stability than did those who have suffered his
repression" -- New York Times Middle East correspondent Alan Cowell,
describing Washington's judgment as George Bush I authorized Saddam
to crush the Shi'ite rebellion in 1991, which probably would have
overthrown the tyrant.

Saddam is at last on trial for his crimes. The first trial, now
underway, is for crimes he committed in 1982. 1982 happens to be an
important year in US-Iraq relations. It was in 1982 that Reagan removed
Iraq from the list of states supporting terror so that aid could flow
to his friend in Baghdad. Rumsfeld then visited Baghdad to confirm the
arrangements. Judging by reports and commentary, it would be impolite
to mention any of these facts, let alone to suggest that some others
might be standing alongside Saddam before the bar of justice. Removing
Saddam from the list of states supporting terrorism left a gap. It was
at once filled by Cuba, perhaps in recognition of the fact that the US
terrorist wars against Cuba from 1961 had just peaked, including events
that would be on the front pages right now in societies that valued
their freedom, to which I'll briefly return. Again, that tells us
something about the real elite attitudes towards the plague of the
modern age.

Since the first War on Terror was waged by those now carrying out the
redeclared war, or their immediate mentors, it follows that anyone
seriously interested in the re-declared War on Terror should ask at
once how it was carried out in the 1980s. The topic, however, is under
a virtual ban. That becomes understandable as soon as we investigate
the facts: the first War on Terror quickly became a murderous and
brutal terrorist war, in every corner of the world where it reached,
leaving traumatized societies that may never recover. What happened is
hardly obscure, but doctrinally unacceptable, therefore protected from
inspection. Unearthing the record is an enlightening exercise, with
enormous implications for the future.

These are a few of the relevant facts, and they definitely do matter.
Let's turn to the second of the guidelines: elementary moral
principles. The most elementary is a virtual truism: decent people
apply to themselves the same standards that they apply to others, if
not more stringent ones. Adherence to this principle of universality
would have many useful consequences. For one thing, it would save a lot
of trees. The principle would radically reduce published reporting and
commentary on social and political affairs. It would virtually
eliminate the newly fashionable discipline of Just War theory. And it
would wipe the slate almost clean with regard to the War on Terror. The
reason is the same in all cases: the principle of universality is
rejected, for the most part tacitly, though sometimes explicitly. Those
are very sweeping statements. I purposely put them in a stark form to
invite you to challenge them, and I hope you do. You will find, I
think, that although the statements are somewhat overdrawn -
purposely -- they nevertheless are uncomfortably close to accurate, and
in fact very fully documented. But try for yourselves and see.
This most elementary of moral truisms is sometimes upheld at least in
words. One example, of critical importance today, is the Nuremberg
Tribunal. In sentencing Nazi war criminals to death, Justice Robert
Jackson, Chief of Counsel for the United States, spoke eloquently, and
memorably, on the principle of universality. "If certain acts of
violation of treaties are crimes," he said, "they are crimes
whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and
we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against
others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us....We
must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants is
the record on which history will judge us tomorrow. To pass these
defendants a poisoned chalice is to put it to our own lips as well."

That is a clear and honorable statement of the principle of
universality. But the judgment at Nuremberg itself crucially violated
this principle. The Tribunal had to define "war crime" and
"crimes against humanity." It crafted these definition very
carefully so that crimes are criminal only if they were not committed
by the allies. Urban bombing of civilian concentrations was excluded,
because the allies carried it out more barbarically than the Nazis. And
Nazi war criminals, like Admiral Doenitz, were able to plead
successfully that their British and US counterparts had carried out the
same practices. The reasoning was outlined by Telford Taylor, a
distinguished international lawyer who was Jackson's Chief Counsel
for War Crimes. He explained that "to punish the foe - especially
the vanquished foe - for conduct in which the enforcing nation has
engaged, would be so grossly inequitable as to discredit the laws
themselves." That is correct, but the operative definition of
"crime" also discredits the laws themselves. Subsequent Tribunals
are discredited by the same moral flaw, but the self-exemption of the
powerful from international law and elementary moral principle goes far
beyond this illustration, and reaches to just about every aspect of the
two phases of the War on Terror.

Let's turn to the third background issue: defining "terror" and
distinguishing it from aggression and legitimate resistance. I have
been writing about terror for 25 years, ever since the Reagan
administration declared its War on Terror. I've been using
definitions that seem to be doubly appropriate: first, they make sense;
and second, they are the official definitions of those waging the war.
To take one of these official definitions, terrorism is "the
calculated use of violence or threat of violence to attain goals that
are political, religious, or ideological in nature...through
intimidation, coercion, or instilling fear," typically targeting
civilians. The British government's definition is about the same:
"Terrorism is the use, or threat, of action which is violent,
damaging or disrupting, and is intended to influence the government or
intimidate the public and is for the purpose of advancing a political,
religious, or ideological cause." These definitions seem fairly clear
and close to ordinary usage. There also seems to be general agreement
that they are appropriate when discussing the terrorism of enemies.

But a problem at once arises. These definitions yield an entirely
unacceptable consequence: it follows that the US is a leading terrorist
state, dramatically so during the Reaganite war on terror. Merely to
take the most uncontroversial case, Reagan's state-directed terrorist
war against Nicaragua was condemned by the World Court, backed by two
Security Council resolutions (vetoed by the US, with Britain politely
abstaining). Another completely clear case is Cuba, where the record by
now is voluminous, and not controversial. And there is a long list
beyond them.

We may ask, however, whether such crimes as the state-directed attack
against Nicaragua are really terrorism, or whether they rise to the
level of the much higher crime of aggression. The concept of aggression
was defined clearly enough by Justice Jackson at Nuremberg in terms
that were basically reiterated in an authoritative General Assembly
resolution. An "aggressor," Jackson proposed to the Tribunal, is a
state that is the first to commit such actions as "Invasion of its
armed forces, with or without a declaration of war, of the territory of
another State," or "Provision of support to armed bands formed in
the territory of another State, or refusal, notwithstanding the request
of the invaded State, to take in its own territory, all the measures in
its power to deprive those bands of all assistance or protection."
The first provision unambiguously applies to the US-UK invasion of
Iraq. The second, just as clearly, applies to the US war against
Nicaragua. However, we might give the current incumbents in Washington
and their mentors the benefit of the doubt, considering them guilty
only of the lesser crime of international terrorism, on a huge and
unprecedented scale.

It may also be recalled the aggression was defined at Nuremberg as
"the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes
in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole"
- all the evil in the tortured land of Iraq that flowed from the
US-UK invasion, for example, and in Nicaragua too, if the charge is not
reduced to international terrorism. And in Lebanon, and all too many
other victims who are easily dismissed on grounds of wrong agency -
right to the present. A week ago (January 13), a CIA predator drone
attacked a village in Pakistan, murdering dozens of civilians, entire
families, who just happened to live in a suspected al-Qaeda hideout.
Such routine actions elicit little notice, a legacy of the poisoning of
the moral culture by centuries of imperial thuggery.

The World Court did not take up the charge of aggression in the
Nicaragua case. The reasons are instructive, and of quite considerable
contemporary relevance. Nicaragua's case was presented by the
distinguished Harvard University law professor Abram Chayes, former
legal adviser to the State Department. The Court rejected a large part
of his case on the grounds that in accepting World Court jurisdiction
in 1946, the US had entered a reservation excluding itself from
prosecution under multilateral treaties, including the UN Charter. The
Court therefore restricted its deliberations to customary international
law and a bilateral US-Nicaragua treaty, so that the more serious
charges were excluded. Even on these very narrow grounds, the Court
charged Washington with "unlawful use of force" - in lay
language, international terrorism - and ordered it to terminate the
crimes and pay substantial reparations. The Reaganites reacted by
escalating the war, also officially endorsing attacks by their
terrorist forces against "soft targets," undefended civilian
targets. The terrorist war left the country in ruins, with a death toll
equivalent to 2.25 million in US per capita terms, more than the total
of all wartime casualties in US history combined. After the shattered
country fell back under US control, it declined to further misery. It
is now the second poorest country in Latin America after Haiti - and
by accident, also second after Haiti in intensity of US intervention in
the past century. The standard way to lament these tragedies is to say
that Haiti and Nicaragua are "battered by storms of their own
making," to quote the Boston Globe, at the liberal extreme of
American journalism. Guatemala ranks third both in misery and
intervention, more storms of their own making.

In the Western canon, none of this exists. All is excluded not only
from general history and commentary, but also quite tellingly from the
huge literature on the War on Terror re-declared in 2001, though its
relevance can hardly be in doubt.

These considerations have to do with the boundary between terror and
aggression. What about the boundary between terror and resistance? One
question that arises is the legitimacy of actions to realize "the
right to self-determination, freedom, and independence, as derived from
the Charter of the United Nations, of people forcibly deprived of that
right..., particularly peoples under colonial and racist regimes and
foreign occupation..." Do such actions fall under terror or
resistance? The quoted word are from the most forceful denunciation of
the crime of terrorism by the UN General Assembly; in December 1987,
taken up under Reaganite pressure. Hence it is obviously an important
resolution, even more so because of the near-unanimity of support for
it. The resolution passed 153-2 (Honduras alone abstaining). It stated
that "nothing in the present resolution could in any way prejudice
the right to self-determination, freedom, and independence," as
characterized in the quoted words.

The two countries that voted against the resolution explained their
reasons at the UN session. They were based on the paragraph just
quoted. The phrase "colonial and racist regimes" was understood to
refer to their ally apartheid South Africa, then consummating its
massacres in the neighboring countries and continuing its brutal
repression within. Evidently, the US and Israel could not condone
resistance to the apartheid regime, particularly when it was led by
Nelson Mandela's ANC, one of the world's "more notorious
terrorist groups," as Washington determined at the same time.
Granting legitimacy to resistance against "foreign occupation" was
also unacceptable. The phrase was understood to refer to Israel's
US-backed military occupation, then in its 20th year. Evidently,
resistance to that occupation could not be condoned either, even though
at the time of the resolution it scarcely existed: despite extensive
torture, degradation, brutality, robbery of land and resources, and
other familiar concomitants of military occupation, Palestinians under
occupation still remained "Samidin," those who quietly endured.

Technically, there are no vetoes at the General Assembly. In the real
world, a negative US vote is a veto, in fact a double veto: the
resolution is not implemented, and is vetoed from reporting and
history. It should be added that the voting pattern is quite common at
the General Assembly, and also at the Security Council, on a wide range
of issues. Ever since the mid-1960s, when the world fell pretty much
out of control, the US is far in the lead in Security Council vetoes,
Britain second, with no one else even close. It is also of some
interest to note that a majority of the American public favors
abandonment of the veto, and following the will of the majority even if
Washington disapproves, facts virtually unknown in the US, or I suppose
elsewhere. That suggests another conservative way to deal with some of
the problems of the world: pay attention to public opinion.

Terrorism directed or supported by the most powerful states continues
to the present, often in shocking ways. These facts offer one useful
suggestion as to how to mitigate the plague spread by "depraved
opponents of civilization itself" in "a return to barbarism in the
modern age": Stop participating in terror and supporting it. That
would certainly contribute to the proclaimed objections. But that
suggestion too is off the agenda, for the usual reasons. When it is
occasionally voiced, the reaction is reflexive: a tantrum about how
those who make this rather conservative proposal are blaming everything
on the US.
Even with careful sanitization of discussion, dilemmas constantly
arise. One just arose very recently, when Luis Posada Carriles entered
the US illegally. Even by the narrow operative definition of
"terror," he is clearly one of the most notorious international
terrorists, from the 1960s to the present. Venezuela requested that he
be extradited to face charges for the bombing of a Cubana airliner in
Venezuela, killing 73 people. The charges are admittedly credible, but
there is a real difficulty. After Posada miraculously escaped from a
Venezuelan prison, the liberal Boston Globe reports, he "was hired by
US covert operatives to direct the resupply operation for the
Nicaraguan contras from El Salvador" - that is, to play a prominent
role in terrorist atrocities that are incomparably worse than blowing
up the Cubana airliner. Hence the dilemma. To quote the press:
"Extraditing him for trial could send a worrisome signal to covert
foreign agents that they cannot count on unconditional protection from
the US government, and it could expose the CIA to embarrassing public
disclosures from a former operative." Evidently, a difficult problem.

The Posada dilemma was, thankfully, resolved by the courts, which
rejected Venezuela's appeal for his extradition, in violation of the
US-Venezuela extradition treaty. A day later, the head of the FBI,
Robert Mueller, urged Europe to speed US demands for extradition: "We
are always looking to see how we can make the extradition process go
faster," he said. "We think we owe it to the victims of terrorism
to see to it that justice is done efficiently and effectively." At
the Ibero-American Summit shortly after, the leaders of Spain and the
Latin American countries "backed Venezuela's efforts to have [Posada]
extradited from the United States to face trial" for the Cubana
airliner bombing, and again condemned the "blockade" of Cuba by the
US, endorsing regular near-unanimous UN resolutions, the most recent
with a vote of 179-4 (US, Israel, Marshall Islands, Palau). After
strong protests from the US Embassy, the Summit withdrew the call for
extradition, but refused to yield on the demand for an end to the
economic warfare. Posada is therefore free to join his colleague
Orlando Bosch in Miami. Bosch is implicated in dozens of terrorist
crimes, including the Cubana airliner bombing, many on US soil. The FBI
and Justice Department wanted him deported as a threat to national
security, but Bush I took care of that by granting him a presidential
pardon.

There are other such examples. We might want to bear them in mind when
we read Bush II's impassioned pronouncement that "the United States
makes no distinction between those who commit acts of terror and those
who support them, because they're equally as guilty of murder," and
"the civilized world must hold those regimes to account." This was
proclaimed to great applause at the National Endowment for Democracy, a
few days after Venezuela's extradition request had been refused.
Bush's remarks pose another dilemma. Either the US is part of the
civilized world, and must send the US air force to bomb Washington; or
it declares itself to be outside the civilized world. The logic is
impeccable, but fortunately, logic has been dispatched as deep into the
memory hole as moral truisms.

The Bush doctrine that "those who harbor terrorists are as guilty as
the terrorists themselves" was promulgated when the Taliban asked for
evidence before handing over people the US suspected of terrorism -
without credible evidence, as the FBI conceded many months later. The
doctrine is taken very seriously. Harvard international relations
specialist Graham Allison writes that it has "already become a de
facto rule of international relations," revoking "the sovereignty
of states that provide sanctuary to terrorists." Some states, that
is, thanks to the rejection of the principle of universality.
One might also have thought that a dilemma would have arisen when John
Negroponte was appointed to the position of head of counter-terrorism.
As Ambassador to Honduras in the 1980s, he was running the world's
largest CIA station, not because of the grand role of Honduras in world
affairs, but because Honduras was the primary US base for the
international terrorist war for which Washington was condemned by the
ICJ and Security Council (absent the veto). Known in Honduras as "the
Proconsul," Negroponte had the task of ensuring that the
international terrorist operations, which reached remarkable levels of
savagery, would proceed efficiently. His responsibilities in managing
the war on the scene took a new turn after official funding was barred
in 1983, and he had to implement White House orders to bribe and
pressure senior Honduran Generals to step up their support for the
terrorist war using funds from other sources, later funds illegally
transferred from US arms sales to Iran. The most vicious of the
Honduran killers and torturers was General Alvarez Martínez, the chief
of the Honduran armed forces at the time, who had informed the US that
"he intended to use the Argentine method of eliminating suspected
subversives." Negroponte regularly denied gruesome state crimes in
Honduras to ensure that military aid would continue to flow for
international terrorism. Knowing all about Alvarez, the Reagan
administration awarded him the Legion of Merit medal for "encouraging
the success of democratic processes in Honduras." The elite unit
responsible for the worst crimes in Honduras was Battalion 3-16,
organized and trained by Washington and its Argentine neo-Nazi
associates. Honduran military officers in charge of the Battalion were
on the CIA payroll. When the government of Honduras finally tried to
deal with these crimes and bring the perpetrators to justice, the
Reagan-Bush administration refused to allow Negroponte to testify, as
the courts requested.

There was virtually no reaction to the appointment of a leading
international terrorist to the top counter-terrorism position in the
world. Nor to the fact that at the very same time, the heroine of the
popular struggle that overthrew the vicious Somoza regime in Nicaragua,
Dora María Téllez, was denied a visa to teach at the Harvard Divinity
School, as a terrorist. Her crime was to have helped overthrow a
US-backed tyrant and mass murderer. Orwell would not have known whether
to laugh or weep.

So far I have been keeping to the kinds of topics that would be
addressed in a discussion of the War on Terror that is not deformed to
accord with the iron laws of doctrine. And this barely scratches the
surface. But let us now adopt prevailing Western hypocrisy and
cynicism, and keep to the operative definition of "terror." It is
the same as the official definitions, but with the Nuremberg exception:
admissible terror is your terror; ours is exempt..

Even with this constraint, terror is a major problem, undoubtedly. And
to mitigate or terminate the threat should be a high priority.
Regrettably, it is not. That is all too easy to demonstrate, and the
consequences are likely to be severe.

The invasion of Iraq is perhaps the most glaring example of the low
priority assigned by US-UK leaders to the threat of terror. Washington
planners had been advised, even by their own intelligence agencies,
that the invasion was likely to increase the risk of terror. And it
did, as their own intelligence agencies confirm. The National
Intelligence Council reported a year ago that "Iraq and other
possible conflicts in the future could provide recruitment, training
grounds, technical skills and language proficiency for a new class of
terrorists who are `professionalized' and for whom political violence
becomes an end in itself," spreading elsewhere to defend Muslim lands
from attack by "infidel invaders" in a globalized network of
"diffuse Islamic extremist groups," with Iraq now replacing the
Afghan training grounds for this more extensive network, as a result of
the invasion. A high-level government review of the "war on terror"
two years after the invasion `focused on how to deal with the rise of a
new generation of terrorists, schooled in Iraq over the past couple
years. Top government officials are increasingly turning their
attention to anticipate what one called "the bleed out" of hundreds
or thousands of Iraq-trained jihadists back to their home countries
throughout the Middle East and Western Europe. "It's a new piece of a
new equation," a former senior Bush administration official said.
"If you don't know who they are in Iraq, how are you going to locate
them in Istanbul or London?"' (Washington Post)

Last May the CIA reported that "Iraq has become a magnet for Islamic
militants similar to Soviet-occupied Afghanistan two decades ago and
Bosnia in the 1990s," according to US officials quoted in the New
York Times. The CIA concluded that "Iraq may prove to be an even more
effective training ground for Islamic extremists than Afghanistan was
in Al Qaeda's early days, because it is serving as a real-world
laboratory for urban combat." Shortly after the London bombing last
July, Chatham House released a study concluding that "there is `no
doubt' that the invasion of Iraq has `given a boost to the al-Qaida
network' in propaganda, recruitment and fundraising,` while providing
an ideal training area for terrorists"; and that "the UK is at
particular risk because it is the closest ally of the United States"
and is "a pillion passenger" of American policy" in Iraq and
Afghanistan. There is extensive supporting evidence to show that -- as
anticipated -- the invasion increased the risk of terror and nuclear
proliferation. None of this shows that planners prefer these
consequences, of course. Rather, they are not of much concern in
comparison with much higher priorities that are obscure only to those
who prefer what human rights researchers sometimes call "intentional
ignorance."
Once again we find, very easily, a way to reduce the threat of terror:
stop acting in ways that - predictably - enhance the threat.

Though enhancement of the threat of terror and proliferation was
anticipated, the invasion did so even in unanticipated ways. It is
common to say that no WMD were found in Iraq after exhaustive search.
That is not quite accurate, however. There were stores of WMD in Iraq:
namely, those produced in the 1980s, thanks to aid provided by the US
and Britain, along with others. These sites had been secured by UN
inspectors, who were dismantling the weapons. But the inspectors were
dismissed by the invaders and the sites were left unguarded. The
inspectors nevertheless continued to carry out their work with
satellite imagery. They discovered sophisticated massive looting of
these installations in over 100 sites, including equipment for
producing solid and liquid propellant missiles, biotoxins and other
materials usable for chemical and biological weapons, and
high-precision equipment capable of making parts for nuclear and
chemical weapons and missiles. A Jordanian journalist was informed by
officials in charge of the Jordanian-Iraqi border that after US-UK
forces took over, radioactive materials were detected in one of every
eight trucks crossing to Jordan, destination unknown.

The ironies are almost inexpressible. The official justification for
the US-UK invasion was to prevent the use of WMD that did not exist.
The invasion provided the terrorists who had been mobilized by the US
and its allies with the means to develop WMD -- namely, equipment they
had provided to Saddam, caring nothing about the terrible crimes they
later invoked to whip up support for the invasion. It is as if Iran
were now making nuclear weapons using fissionable materials provided by
the US to Iran under the Shah -- which may indeed be happening.
Programs to recover and secure such materials were having considerable
success in the '90s, but like the war on terror, these programs fell
victim to Bush administration priorities as they dedicated their energy
and resources to invading Iraq.

Elsewhere in the Mideast too terror is regarded as secondary to
ensuring that the region is under control. Another illustration is
Bush's imposition of new sanctions on Syria in May 2004, implementing
the Syria Accountability Act passed by Congress a few months earlier.
Syria is on the official list of states sponsoring terrorism, despite
Washington's acknowledgment that Syria has not been implicated in
terrorist acts for many years and has been highly cooperative in
providing important intelligence to Washington on al-Qaeda and other
radical Islamist groups. The gravity of Washington's concern over
Syria's links to terror was revealed by President Clinton when he
offered to remove Syria from the list of states sponsoring terror if it
agreed to US-Israeli peace terms. When Syria insisted on recovering its
conquered territory, it remained on the list. Implementation of the
Syria Accountability Act deprived the US of an important source of
information about radical Islamist terrorism in order to achieve the
higher goal of establishing in Syria a regime that will accept
US-Israeli demands.

Turning to another domain, the Treasury Department has a bureau (OFAC,
Office of Foreign Assets Control) that is assigned the task of
investigating suspicious financial transfers, a central component of
the "war on terror." In April 2004, OFAC informed Congress that of
its 120 employees, four were assigned to tracking the finances of Osama
bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, while almost two dozen were occupied with
enforcing the embargo against Cuba. From 1990 to 2003 there were 93
terrorism-related investigations with $9000 in fines; and 11,000
Cuba-related investigations with $8 million in fines. The revelations
received the silent treatment in the US media, elsewhere as well to my
knowledge.

Why should the Treasury Department devote vastly more energy to
strangling Cuba than to the "war on terror"? The basic reasons were
explained in internal documents of the Kennedy-Johnson years. State
Department planners warned that the "very existence" of the Castro
regime is "successful defiance" of US policies going back 150
years, to the Monroe Doctrine; not Russians, but intolerable defiance
of the master of the hemisphere, much like Iran's crime of successful
defiance in 1979, or Syria's rejection of Clinton's demands.
Punishment of the population was regarded as fully legitimate, we learn
from internal documents. "The Cuban people [are] responsible for the
regime," the Eisenhower State Department decided, so that the US has
the right to cause them to suffer by economic strangulation, later
escalated to direct terror by Kennedy. Eisenhower and Kennedy agreed
that the embargo would hasten Fidel Castro's departure as a result of
the "rising discomfort among hungry Cubans." The basic thinking was
summarized by State Department official Lester Mallory: Castro would be
removed "through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic
dissatisfaction and hardship so every possible means should be
undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba in order to
bring about hunger, desperation and the overthrow of the government."
When Cuba was in dire straits after the collapse of the Soviet Union,
Washington intensified the punishment of the people of Cuba, at the
initiative of liberal Democrats. The author of the 1992 measures to
tighten the blockade proclaimed that "my objective is to wreak havoc
in Cuba" (Representative Robert Torricelli). All of this continues
until the present moment.

The Kennedy administration was also deeply concerned about the threat
of Cuban successful development, which might be a model for others. But
even apart from these standard concerns, successful defiance in itself
is intolerable, ranked far higher as a priority than combating terror.
These are just further illustrations of principles that are
well-established, internally rational, clear enough to the victims, but
scarcely perceptible in the intellectual world of the agents.

If reducing the threat of terror were a high priority for Washington or
London, as it certainly should be, there would be ways to proceed -
even apart from the unmentionable idea of withdrawing participation.
The first step, plainly, is to try to understand its roots. With regard
to Islamic terror, there is a broad consensus among intelligence
agencies and researchers. They identify two categories: the jihadis,
who regard themselves as a vanguard, and their audience, which may
reject terror but nevertheless regard their cause as just. A serious
counter-terror campaign would therefore begin by considering the
grievances , and where appropriate, addressing them, as should be done
with or without the threat of terror. There is broad agreement among
specialists that al-Qaeda-style terror "is today less a product of
Islamic fundamentalism than of a simple strategic goal: to compel the
United States and its Western allies to withdraw combat forces from the
Arabian Peninsula and other Muslim countries" (Robert Pape, who has
done the major research on suicide bombers). Serious analysts have
pointed out that bin Laden's words and deeds correlate closely. The
jihadis organized by the Reagan administration and its allies ended
their Afghan-based terrorism inside Russia after the Russians withdrew
from Afghanistan, though they continued it from occupied Muslim
Chechnya, the scene of horrifying Russian crimes back to the 19th
century. Osama turned against the US in 1991 because he took it to be
occupying the holiest Arab land; that was later acknowledged by the
Pentagon as a reason for shifting US bases from Saudi Arabia to Iraq.
Additionally, he was angered by the rejection of his effort to join the
attack against Saddam.
In the most extensive scholarly inquiry into the jihadi phenomenon,
Fawaz Gerges concludes that after 9/11, "the dominant response to Al
Qaeda in the Muslim world was very hostile," specifically among the
jihadis, who regarded it as a dangerous extremist fringe. Instead of
recognizing that opposition to Al Qaeda offered Washington "the most
effective way to drive a nail into its coffin" by finding
"intelligent means to nourish and support the internal forces that
were opposed to militant ideologies like the bin Laden network," he
writes, the Bush administration did exactly what bin Laden hoped it
would do: resort to violence, particularly in the invasion of Iraq.
Al-Azhar in Egypt, the oldest institution of religious higher learning
in the Islamic world, issued a fatwa, which gained strong support,
advising "all Muslims in the world to make jihad against invading
American forces" in a war that Bush had declared against Islam. A
leading religious figure at al-Azhar, who had been "one of the first
Muslim scholars to condemn Al Qaeda [and was] often criticized by
ultraconservative clerics as a pro-Western reformer, ruled that efforts
to stop the American invasion [of Iraq] are a `binding Islamic
duty'." Investigations by Israeli and Saudi intelligence, supported
by US strategic studies institutes, conclude that foreign fighters in
Iraq, some 5-10% of the insurgents, were mobilized by the invasion, and
had no previous record of association with terrorist groups. The
achievements of Bush administration planners in inspiring Islamic
radicalism and terror, and joining Osama in creating a "clash of
civilizations," are quite impressive.

The senior CIA analyst responsible for tracking Osama bin Laden from
1996, Michael Scheuer, writes that "bin Laden has been precise in
telling America the reasons he is waging war on us. None of the reasons
have anything to do with our freedom, liberty, and democracy, but have
everything to do with U.S. policies and actions in the Muslim world."
Osama's concern "is out to drastically alter U.S. and Western
policies toward the Islamic world," Scheuer writes: "He is a
practical warrior, not an apocalyptic terrorist in search of
Armageddon." As Osama constantly repeats, "Al Qaeda supports no
Islamic insurgency that seeks to conquer new lands." Preferring
comforting illusions, Washington ignores "the ideological power,
lethality, and growth potential of the threat personified by Osama bin
Laden, as well as the impetus that threat has been given by the
U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Muslim Iraq, [which is] icing on
the cake for al Qaeda." "U.S. forces and policies are completing
the radicalization of the Islamic world, something Osama bin Laden has
been trying to do with substantial but incomplete success since the
early 1990s. As a result, [Scheuer adds,] it is fair to conclude that
the United States of America remains bin Laden's only indispensable
ally."

The grievances are very real. A Pentagon advisory Panel concluded a
year ago that "Muslims do not `hate our freedom,' but rather they
hate our policies," adding that "when American public diplomacy
talks about bringing democracy to Islamic societies, this is seen as no
more than self-serving hypocrisy." The conclusions go back many
years. In 1958, President Eisenhower puzzled about "the campaign of
hatred against us" in the Arab world, "not by the governments but
by the people," who are "on Nasser's side," supporting
independent secular nationalism. The reasons for the "campaign of
hatred" were outlined by the National Security Council: "In the
eyes of the majority of Arabs the United States appears to be opposed
to the realization of the goals of Arab nationalism. They believe that
the United States is seeking to protect its interest in Near East oil
by supporting the status quo and opposing political or economic
progress." Furthermore, the perception is understandable: "our
economic and cultural interests in the area have led not unnaturally to
close U.S. relations with elements in the Arab world whose primary
interest lies in the maintenance of relations with the West and the
status quo in their countries," blocking democracy and development.

Much the same was found by the Wall Street Journal when it surveyed the
opinions of "moneyed Muslims" immediately after 9/11: bankers,
professionals, businessmen, committed to official "Western values"
and embedded in the neoliberal globalization project. They too were
dismayed by Washington's support for harsh authoritarian states and
the barriers it erects against development and democracy by "propping
up oppressive regimes." They had new grievances, however, beyond
those reported by the NSC in 1958: Washington's sanctions regime in
Iraq and support for Israel's military occupation and takeover of the
territories. There was no survey of the great mass of poor and
suffering people, but it is likely that their sentiments are more
intense, coupled with bitter resentment of the Western-oriented elites
and corrupt and brutal rulers backed by Western power who ensure that
the enormous wealth of the region flows to the West, apart from
enriching themselves. The Iraq invasion only intensified these feelings
further, much as anticipated.

There are ways to deal constructively with the threat of terror, though
not those preferred by "bin Laden's indispensable ally," or those
who try to avoid the real world by striking heroic poses about
Islamo-fascism, or who simply claim that no proposals are made when
there are quite straightforward proposals that they do not like. The
constructive ways have to begin with an honest look in the mirror,
never an easy task, always a necessary one.

http://www.amnesty.ie/content/view/full/5051/

Have a look how many USA newspapers and magazines published this most
pertinent text ...

http://news.google.com/news?&tab=wn&ncl=http://breakingnews.iol.ie/news/story.asp%3Fj%3D169725930%26p%3Dy697z6636&hl=en&filter=0

NONE! haha.. in the NAZI era the term was "Gleichschaltung"

http://www.google.com/search?q=presse+gleichschaltung