In answer to John’s e-mail, Dounia wrote
Hi John,
I enjoyed reading your last e-mail. It was really interesting. I like your free time activities, your favourite sport and also your beautiful State Alaska.
So now it’s my turn to give you some information about myself and my hometown.
I’m Dounia. I’m 17 years old and I’m from Salé, a nice city in Morocco. I still live with my parents like any other Moroccan girl. I like surfing very much in addition to listening to music.
I’m very proud of being Moroccan. Morocco is a really fantastic country. You should visit it.
There are many interesting things to see and to taste. I hope you’ll come one day to see by yourself the beauty of the country and the friendliness of the Moroccan people.
That’s all for the time being. E-mail me when you can.
Take care,
Dounia Abakil
Tuesday 20 September 2011
Monday 12 September 2011
Al-Qa'ida, and the Myth Behind the War on Terrorism
Al-Qa'ida, and the Myth Behind the War on Terrorism
Patrick Cockburn
September 11, 2011
The atrocities against America created the image of Osama bin Laden as the leader of a global jihad upon the West. It was a fantasy that governments willingly, and disastrously, helped to perpetuate
What was the most devastating attack by al-Qa'ida in the past few months? Despite all the pious talk this weekend about combating "terrorism", few will have heard of it. It happened on 15 August when bombers killed 63 people in 17 cities up and down Iraq in the space of a few hours.
Such carnage is ignored because the US and Britain see al-Qa'ida only in relation to themselves, and because all the victims were Iraqis. The real motives of al-Qa'ida, often rooted in local struggles between Palestinians and Israelis or Sunni and Shia, are disregarded and replaced by fantasies about clashing civilisations.
As the arch-exponent of "terrorism", al-Qa'ida is both less and more than the picture of it presented by governments, intelligence agencies, journalists and commentators. As an organisation, it has always been small and ramshackle, but, if it appears larger, it is because it has the ability to tap into fierce local disputes. Osama bin Laden may have wanted to launch global jihad, but the majority of those who claimed to be al-Qa'ida since 9/11 have had a different and more immediate agenda.
In Iraq, al-Qa'ida in Mesopotamia, the local franchisee, though never under the control of Bin Laden, was always more interested in butchering Iraqi Shia than in killing American soldiers. The Pakistani Taliban, closely linked to al-Qa'ida, still devotes part of its energies to sending suicide bombers to blow up Shia villagers and city labourers, even when it is facing offensives by the Pakistan army.
Al-Qa'ida's sectarianism is fortunate for the West. Many of the attacks attributed to al-Qa'ida since 9/11 have failed because those carrying them out could not build the simplest explosive device. Why this has happened is something of a mystery since such expertise is all too widespread in areas of al-Qa'ida strength, in central Iraq, north-west Pakistan and even parts of southern Yemen. But the knowledge is not passed on because the bombmakers in these areas fortunately remain absorbed in seeking to murder their Muslim neighbours and show limited interest in spreading mayhem to Chicago or New York.
Al-Qa'ida as a global organisation has always been something of a fiction. Bin Laden may have wanted international reach but, aside from 9/11, seldom achieved it. His propaganda has been accepted as reality by self-interested governments and intelligence agencies with an interest in exaggerating the al-Qa'ida threat to enhance their own authority. Even the most botched and amateur bombing attempt has been portrayed as if it were the Gunpowder Plot revisited. Al-Qa'ida in the Arabian Peninsula commented derisively that it did not matter if its plots failed or succeeded, because even failures disrupted world air traffic and created chaos.
Al-Qa'ida appears to have tentacles all over the world because groups, often with different agendas but using similar tactics, became its franchisees. This notion has also taken hold because autocracies everywhere have an interest in pretending that their opponents are all Islamic fundamentalists, hand-in-glove with al-Qa'ida. In Libya, Muammar Gaddafi did this with great success in his relations with the CIA and MI6, partly because the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group was led by veterans of the Afghan war, such as Abdel Hakim Belhaj. India in Kashmir and Russia in Chechnya, battling what were essentially widely supported separatist movements, could claim to be fearless fighters against Bin Laden and al-Qa'ida.
On 9/11, al-Qa'ida's great success was to publicise its own existence and to spark an American overreaction that played straight into its hands. It provoked the US to overthrow the Taliban and Saddam Hussein and become entrapped in civil wars of great complexity. It has become easy in retrospect to blame George W Bush and his lieutenants in Washington and on the ground for such errors as dissolving the Iraqi army and the Baath party. But at the time – though they have remained very quiet about it since – the Shia and Kurdish leaders were all in favour of eliminating these two main instruments of Sunni power and letting America take the blame.
The Iraq war relaunched al-Qa'ida in another way. From the beginning, US military spokesmen thought it was a smart idea to claim that insurgent attacks, whoever had made them, were the work of al-Qa'ida. The aim was to win support for the war in the US, but in Iraq, where the US occupation was increasingly unpopular, it gave the false impression that al-Qa'ida was leading the guerrilla attacks on the US army. Local children started waving black al-Qa'ida flags at US soldiers. Sunni Arabs thought they might be a useful ally and the movement found it easier to raise money across the Arab world.
Al-Qa'ida has proved so elusive and difficult to eliminate mainly because it has never existed in the form that governments and intelligence agencies pretend. Its membership, even before 2001, was always small and it had to hire local Afghan tribesmen by the day to make propaganda videos. But scarcely a month passes without the CIA announcing that its drones have killed operational planners of al-Qa'ida, as if the group were the mirror image of the Pentagon. Self-declared experts on "terrorism" appear as "talking heads" on television, declaring that the elimination of some al-Qa'ida figure is a body blow to the organisation, but, such is its resilience, that the threat to us all remains undiminished.
Could any US government have reacted differently after 9/11? Was not the popular desire for retaliation so strong that Washington could not avoid walking into the al-Qa'ida trap? There is something in this, but the reason this form of "terrorism" is so effective is that political leaders are tempted to use the opportunity to expand their power by highlighting the threat. They can portray critics who do not go along with this as naive or unpatriotic. Necessary reforms can be dumped amid a general call to rally around the flag.
This overreaction to "terrorist" attacks is not quite inevitable. In Northern Ireland after the start of the troubles in 1968, the Provisional IRA became expert at provoking the British Army and government into overreacting. When a British soldier was killed, the collective punishment of a Roman Catholic district would follow and young men rushed to join the Provisionals. It took a dozen years before the British Army realised that it was reacting as the IRA hoped it would react.
Has the US learned a similar lesson? It looks doubtful because no US president can admit that he has fought unnecessary wars in pursuit of an enemy that barely exists.
Patrick Cockburn
ENJOYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!
Sincerelyours
Patrick Cockburn
September 11, 2011
The atrocities against America created the image of Osama bin Laden as the leader of a global jihad upon the West. It was a fantasy that governments willingly, and disastrously, helped to perpetuate
What was the most devastating attack by al-Qa'ida in the past few months? Despite all the pious talk this weekend about combating "terrorism", few will have heard of it. It happened on 15 August when bombers killed 63 people in 17 cities up and down Iraq in the space of a few hours.
Such carnage is ignored because the US and Britain see al-Qa'ida only in relation to themselves, and because all the victims were Iraqis. The real motives of al-Qa'ida, often rooted in local struggles between Palestinians and Israelis or Sunni and Shia, are disregarded and replaced by fantasies about clashing civilisations.
As the arch-exponent of "terrorism", al-Qa'ida is both less and more than the picture of it presented by governments, intelligence agencies, journalists and commentators. As an organisation, it has always been small and ramshackle, but, if it appears larger, it is because it has the ability to tap into fierce local disputes. Osama bin Laden may have wanted to launch global jihad, but the majority of those who claimed to be al-Qa'ida since 9/11 have had a different and more immediate agenda.
In Iraq, al-Qa'ida in Mesopotamia, the local franchisee, though never under the control of Bin Laden, was always more interested in butchering Iraqi Shia than in killing American soldiers. The Pakistani Taliban, closely linked to al-Qa'ida, still devotes part of its energies to sending suicide bombers to blow up Shia villagers and city labourers, even when it is facing offensives by the Pakistan army.
Al-Qa'ida's sectarianism is fortunate for the West. Many of the attacks attributed to al-Qa'ida since 9/11 have failed because those carrying them out could not build the simplest explosive device. Why this has happened is something of a mystery since such expertise is all too widespread in areas of al-Qa'ida strength, in central Iraq, north-west Pakistan and even parts of southern Yemen. But the knowledge is not passed on because the bombmakers in these areas fortunately remain absorbed in seeking to murder their Muslim neighbours and show limited interest in spreading mayhem to Chicago or New York.
Al-Qa'ida as a global organisation has always been something of a fiction. Bin Laden may have wanted international reach but, aside from 9/11, seldom achieved it. His propaganda has been accepted as reality by self-interested governments and intelligence agencies with an interest in exaggerating the al-Qa'ida threat to enhance their own authority. Even the most botched and amateur bombing attempt has been portrayed as if it were the Gunpowder Plot revisited. Al-Qa'ida in the Arabian Peninsula commented derisively that it did not matter if its plots failed or succeeded, because even failures disrupted world air traffic and created chaos.
Al-Qa'ida appears to have tentacles all over the world because groups, often with different agendas but using similar tactics, became its franchisees. This notion has also taken hold because autocracies everywhere have an interest in pretending that their opponents are all Islamic fundamentalists, hand-in-glove with al-Qa'ida. In Libya, Muammar Gaddafi did this with great success in his relations with the CIA and MI6, partly because the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group was led by veterans of the Afghan war, such as Abdel Hakim Belhaj. India in Kashmir and Russia in Chechnya, battling what were essentially widely supported separatist movements, could claim to be fearless fighters against Bin Laden and al-Qa'ida.
On 9/11, al-Qa'ida's great success was to publicise its own existence and to spark an American overreaction that played straight into its hands. It provoked the US to overthrow the Taliban and Saddam Hussein and become entrapped in civil wars of great complexity. It has become easy in retrospect to blame George W Bush and his lieutenants in Washington and on the ground for such errors as dissolving the Iraqi army and the Baath party. But at the time – though they have remained very quiet about it since – the Shia and Kurdish leaders were all in favour of eliminating these two main instruments of Sunni power and letting America take the blame.
The Iraq war relaunched al-Qa'ida in another way. From the beginning, US military spokesmen thought it was a smart idea to claim that insurgent attacks, whoever had made them, were the work of al-Qa'ida. The aim was to win support for the war in the US, but in Iraq, where the US occupation was increasingly unpopular, it gave the false impression that al-Qa'ida was leading the guerrilla attacks on the US army. Local children started waving black al-Qa'ida flags at US soldiers. Sunni Arabs thought they might be a useful ally and the movement found it easier to raise money across the Arab world.
Al-Qa'ida has proved so elusive and difficult to eliminate mainly because it has never existed in the form that governments and intelligence agencies pretend. Its membership, even before 2001, was always small and it had to hire local Afghan tribesmen by the day to make propaganda videos. But scarcely a month passes without the CIA announcing that its drones have killed operational planners of al-Qa'ida, as if the group were the mirror image of the Pentagon. Self-declared experts on "terrorism" appear as "talking heads" on television, declaring that the elimination of some al-Qa'ida figure is a body blow to the organisation, but, such is its resilience, that the threat to us all remains undiminished.
Could any US government have reacted differently after 9/11? Was not the popular desire for retaliation so strong that Washington could not avoid walking into the al-Qa'ida trap? There is something in this, but the reason this form of "terrorism" is so effective is that political leaders are tempted to use the opportunity to expand their power by highlighting the threat. They can portray critics who do not go along with this as naive or unpatriotic. Necessary reforms can be dumped amid a general call to rally around the flag.
This overreaction to "terrorist" attacks is not quite inevitable. In Northern Ireland after the start of the troubles in 1968, the Provisional IRA became expert at provoking the British Army and government into overreacting. When a British soldier was killed, the collective punishment of a Roman Catholic district would follow and young men rushed to join the Provisionals. It took a dozen years before the British Army realised that it was reacting as the IRA hoped it would react.
Has the US learned a similar lesson? It looks doubtful because no US president can admit that he has fought unnecessary wars in pursuit of an enemy that barely exists.
Patrick Cockburn
ENJOYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!
Sincerelyours
And Blessed Are The Ones Who Care For Their Fellow Men!
Sunday 11 September 2011
A Decade After 9/11: We Are What We Loathe
A Decade After 9/11: We Are What We Loathe
By Chris Hedges
I arrived in Times Square around 9:30 on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. A large crowd was transfixed by the huge Jumbotron screens. Billows of smoke could be seen on the screens above us, pouring out of the two World Trade towers. Two planes, I was told by people in the crowd, had plowed into the towers. I walked quickly into the New York Times newsroom at 229 W. 43rd St., grabbed a handful of reporter’s notebooks, slipped my NYPD press card, which would let me through police roadblocks, around my neck, and started down the West Side Highway to the World Trade Center. The highway was closed to traffic. I walked through knots of emergency workers, police and firemen. Fire trucks, emergency vehicles, ambulances, police cars and rescue trucks idled on the asphalt.
The south tower went down around 10 a.m. with a guttural roar. Huge rolling gray clouds of noxious smoke, dust, gas, pulverized concrete, gypsum and the grit of human remains enveloped lower Manhattan. The sun was obscured. The north tower collapsed about 30 minutes later. The dust hung like a shroud over Manhattan.
I headed toward the spot where the towers once stood, passing dazed, ashen and speechless groups of police officers and firefighters. I would pull out a notebook to ask questions and no sounds would come out of their mouths. They forlornly shook their heads and warded me away gently with their hands. By the time I arrived at Ground Zero it was a moonscape; whole floors of the towers had collapsed like an accordion. I pulled out pieces of paper from one floor, and a few feet below were papers from 30 floors away. Small bits of human bodies—a foot in a woman’s shoe, a bit of a leg, part of a torso—lay scattered amid the wreckage.
Scores of people, perhaps more than 200, pushed through the smoke and heat to jump to their deaths from windows that had broken or they had smashed. Sometimes they did this alone, sometimes in pairs. But it seems they took turns, one body cascading downward followed by another. The last acts of individuality. They fell for about 10 seconds, many flailing or replicating the motion of swimmers, reaching 150 miles an hour. Their clothes and, in a few cases, their improvised parachutes made from drapes or tablecloths shredded. They smashed into the pavement with unnerving, sickening thuds. Thump. Thump. Thump. Those who witnessed it were particularly shaken by the sounds the bodies made on impact.
The images of the “jumpers” proved too gruesome for the TV networks. Even before the towers collapsed, the falling men and women were censored from live broadcasts. Isolated pictures appeared the next day in papers, including The New York Times, and then were banished. The mass suicide, one of the most pivotal and important elements in the narrative of 9/11, was expunged. It remains expunged from public consciousness.
The “jumpers” did not fit into the myth the nation demanded. The fate of the “jumpers” said something so profound, so disturbing, about our own fate, smallness in the universe and fragility that it had to be banned. The “jumpers” illustrated that there are thresholds of suffering that elicit a willing embrace of death. The “jumpers” reminded us that there will come, to all of us, final moments when the only choice will be, at best, how we will choose to die, not how we are going to live. And we can die before we physically expire.
The shock of 9/11, however, demanded images and stories of resilience, redemption, heroism, courage, self-sacrifice and generosity, not collective suicide in the face of overwhelming hopelessness and despair.
Reporters in moments of crisis become clinicians. They collect data, facts, descriptions, basic information, and carry out interviews as swiftly as possible. We make these facts fit into familiar narratives. We do not create facts but we manipulate them. We make facts conform to our perceptions of ourselves as Americans and human beings. We work within the confines of national myth. We make journalism and history a refuge from memory. The pretense that mass murder and suicide can be transformed into a tribute to the victory of the human spirit was the lie we all told to the public that day and have been telling ever since. We make sense of the present only through the lens of the past, as the French philosopher Maurice Halbwachs pointed out, recognizing that “our conceptions of the past are affected by the mental images we employ to solve present problems, so that collective memory is essentially a reconstruction of the past in the light of the present. … Memory needs continuous feeding from collective sources and is sustained by social and moral props.”
I returned that night to the newsroom hacking from the fumes released by the burning asbestos, jet fuel, lead, mercury, cellulose and construction debris. I sat at my computer, my thin paper mask still hanging from my neck, trying to write and catch my breath. All who had been at the site that day were noticeable in the newsroom because they were struggling for air. Most of us were convulsed by shock and grief.
There would soon, however, be another reaction. Those of us who were close to the epicenters of the 9/11 attacks would primarily grieve and mourn. Those who had some distance would indulge in the growing nationalist cant and calls for blood that would soon triumph over reason and sanity. Nationalism was a disease I knew intimately as a war correspondent. It is anti-thought. It is primarily about self-exaltation. The flip side of nationalism is always racism, the dehumanization of the enemy and all who appear to question the cause. The plague of nationalism began almost immediately. My son, who was 11, asked me what the difference was between cars flying small American flags and cars flying large American flags.
“The people with the really big flags are the really big assholes,” I told him.
The dead in the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania were used to sanctify the state’s lust for war. To question the rush to war became to dishonor our martyrs. Those of us who knew that the attacks were rooted in the long night of humiliation and suffering inflicted by Israel on the Palestinians, the imposition of our military bases in the Middle East and in the brutal Arab dictatorships that we funded and supported became apostates. We became defenders of the indefensible. We were apologists, as Christopher Hitchens shouted at me on a stage in Berkeley, “for suicide bombers.”
Because few cared to examine our activities in the Muslim world, the attacks became certified as incomprehensible by the state and its lap dogs, the press. Those who carried out the attacks were branded as rising out of a culture and religion that was at best primitive and probably evil. The Quran—although it forbids suicide as well as the murder of women and children—was painted as a manual for fanaticism and terror. The attackers embodied the titanic clash of civilizations, the cosmic battle under way between good and evil, the forces of light and darkness. Images of the planes crashing into the towers and heroic rescuers emerging from the rubble were played and replayed. We were deluged with painful stories of the survivors and victims. The deaths and falling towers became iconographic. The ceremonies of remembrance were skillfully hijacked by the purveyors of war and hatred. They became vehicles to justify doing to others what had been done to us. And as innocents died here, soon other innocents began to die in the Muslim world. A life for a life. Murder for murder. Death for death. Terror for terror.
What was played out in the weeks after the attacks was the old, familiar battle between force and human imagination, between the crude instruments of violence and the capacity for empathy and understanding. Human imagination lost. Coldblooded reason, which does not speak the language of the imagination, won. We began to speak and think in the empty, mindless nationalist clichés about terror that the state handed to us. We became what we abhorred. The deaths were used to justify pre-emptive war, invasion, Shock and Awe, prolonged occupation, targeted assassinations, torture, offshore penal colonies, gunning down families at checkpoints, massive aerial bombardments, drone attacks, missile strikes and the killing of dozens and soon hundreds and then thousands and later tens of thousands and finally hundreds of thousands of innocent people. We produced piles of corpses in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan, and extended the reach of our killing machine to Yemen and Somalia. And by beatifying our dead, by cementing into the national psyche fear and the imperative of permanent war, and by stoking our collective humiliation, the state carried out crimes, atrocities and killings that dwarfed anything carried out against us on 9/11. The best that force can do is impose order. It can never elicit harmony. And force was justified, and is still justified, by the first dead. Ten years later these dead haunt us like Banquo’s ghost.
“It is the first death which infects everyone with the feelings of being threatened,” wrote Elias Canetti. “It is impossible to overrate the part played by the first dead man in the kindling of wars. Rulers who want to unleash war know very well that they must procure or invent a first victim. It needs not be anyone of particular importance, and can even be someone quite unknown. Nothing matters except his death; and it must be believed that the enemy is responsible for this. Every possible cause of his death is suppressed except one: his membership of the group to which one belongs oneself.”
We were unable to accept the reality of this anonymous slaughter. We were unable because it exposed the awful truth that we live in a morally neutral universe where human life, including our life, can be snuffed out in senseless and random violence. It showed us that there is no protection, not from God, fate, luck, omens or the state.
We have still not woken up to whom we have become, to the fatal erosion of domestic and international law and the senseless waste of lives, resources and trillions of dollars to wage wars that ultimately we can never win. We do not see that our own faces have become as contorted as the faces of the demented hijackers who seized the three commercial jetliners a decade ago. We do not grasp that Osama bin Laden’s twisted vision of a world of indiscriminate violence and terror has triumphed. The attacks turned us into monsters, grotesque ghouls, sadists and killers who drop bombs on village children and waterboard those we kidnap, strip of their rights and hold for years without due process. We acted before we were able to think. And it is the satanic lust of violence that has us locked in its grip.
As Wordsworth wrote:
Action is transitory—a step, a blow,
The motion of a muscle—this way or that—
’Tis done; and in the after-vacancy
We wonder at ourselves like men betrayed:
Suffering is permanent, obscure and dark,
And has the nature of infinity.
We could have gone another route. We could have built on the profound sympathy and empathy that swept through the world following the attacks. The revulsion over the crimes that took place 10 years ago, including in the Muslim world, where I was working in the weeks and months after 9/11, was nearly universal. The attacks, if we had turned them over to intelligence agencies and diplomats, might have opened possibilities not of war and death but ultimately reconciliation and communication, of redressing the wrongs that we commit in the Middle East and that are committed by Israel with our blessing. It was a moment we squandered. Our brutality and triumphalism, the byproducts of nationalism and our infantile pride, revived the jihadist movement. We became the radical Islamist movement’s most effective recruiting tool. We descended to its barbarity. We became terrorists too. The sad legacy of 9/11 is that the assholes, on each side, won.
Chris Hedges
ENJOYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!
Sincerelyours
By Chris Hedges
I arrived in Times Square around 9:30 on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. A large crowd was transfixed by the huge Jumbotron screens. Billows of smoke could be seen on the screens above us, pouring out of the two World Trade towers. Two planes, I was told by people in the crowd, had plowed into the towers. I walked quickly into the New York Times newsroom at 229 W. 43rd St., grabbed a handful of reporter’s notebooks, slipped my NYPD press card, which would let me through police roadblocks, around my neck, and started down the West Side Highway to the World Trade Center. The highway was closed to traffic. I walked through knots of emergency workers, police and firemen. Fire trucks, emergency vehicles, ambulances, police cars and rescue trucks idled on the asphalt.
The south tower went down around 10 a.m. with a guttural roar. Huge rolling gray clouds of noxious smoke, dust, gas, pulverized concrete, gypsum and the grit of human remains enveloped lower Manhattan. The sun was obscured. The north tower collapsed about 30 minutes later. The dust hung like a shroud over Manhattan.
I headed toward the spot where the towers once stood, passing dazed, ashen and speechless groups of police officers and firefighters. I would pull out a notebook to ask questions and no sounds would come out of their mouths. They forlornly shook their heads and warded me away gently with their hands. By the time I arrived at Ground Zero it was a moonscape; whole floors of the towers had collapsed like an accordion. I pulled out pieces of paper from one floor, and a few feet below were papers from 30 floors away. Small bits of human bodies—a foot in a woman’s shoe, a bit of a leg, part of a torso—lay scattered amid the wreckage.
Scores of people, perhaps more than 200, pushed through the smoke and heat to jump to their deaths from windows that had broken or they had smashed. Sometimes they did this alone, sometimes in pairs. But it seems they took turns, one body cascading downward followed by another. The last acts of individuality. They fell for about 10 seconds, many flailing or replicating the motion of swimmers, reaching 150 miles an hour. Their clothes and, in a few cases, their improvised parachutes made from drapes or tablecloths shredded. They smashed into the pavement with unnerving, sickening thuds. Thump. Thump. Thump. Those who witnessed it were particularly shaken by the sounds the bodies made on impact.
The images of the “jumpers” proved too gruesome for the TV networks. Even before the towers collapsed, the falling men and women were censored from live broadcasts. Isolated pictures appeared the next day in papers, including The New York Times, and then were banished. The mass suicide, one of the most pivotal and important elements in the narrative of 9/11, was expunged. It remains expunged from public consciousness.
The “jumpers” did not fit into the myth the nation demanded. The fate of the “jumpers” said something so profound, so disturbing, about our own fate, smallness in the universe and fragility that it had to be banned. The “jumpers” illustrated that there are thresholds of suffering that elicit a willing embrace of death. The “jumpers” reminded us that there will come, to all of us, final moments when the only choice will be, at best, how we will choose to die, not how we are going to live. And we can die before we physically expire.
The shock of 9/11, however, demanded images and stories of resilience, redemption, heroism, courage, self-sacrifice and generosity, not collective suicide in the face of overwhelming hopelessness and despair.
Reporters in moments of crisis become clinicians. They collect data, facts, descriptions, basic information, and carry out interviews as swiftly as possible. We make these facts fit into familiar narratives. We do not create facts but we manipulate them. We make facts conform to our perceptions of ourselves as Americans and human beings. We work within the confines of national myth. We make journalism and history a refuge from memory. The pretense that mass murder and suicide can be transformed into a tribute to the victory of the human spirit was the lie we all told to the public that day and have been telling ever since. We make sense of the present only through the lens of the past, as the French philosopher Maurice Halbwachs pointed out, recognizing that “our conceptions of the past are affected by the mental images we employ to solve present problems, so that collective memory is essentially a reconstruction of the past in the light of the present. … Memory needs continuous feeding from collective sources and is sustained by social and moral props.”
I returned that night to the newsroom hacking from the fumes released by the burning asbestos, jet fuel, lead, mercury, cellulose and construction debris. I sat at my computer, my thin paper mask still hanging from my neck, trying to write and catch my breath. All who had been at the site that day were noticeable in the newsroom because they were struggling for air. Most of us were convulsed by shock and grief.
There would soon, however, be another reaction. Those of us who were close to the epicenters of the 9/11 attacks would primarily grieve and mourn. Those who had some distance would indulge in the growing nationalist cant and calls for blood that would soon triumph over reason and sanity. Nationalism was a disease I knew intimately as a war correspondent. It is anti-thought. It is primarily about self-exaltation. The flip side of nationalism is always racism, the dehumanization of the enemy and all who appear to question the cause. The plague of nationalism began almost immediately. My son, who was 11, asked me what the difference was between cars flying small American flags and cars flying large American flags.
“The people with the really big flags are the really big assholes,” I told him.
The dead in the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania were used to sanctify the state’s lust for war. To question the rush to war became to dishonor our martyrs. Those of us who knew that the attacks were rooted in the long night of humiliation and suffering inflicted by Israel on the Palestinians, the imposition of our military bases in the Middle East and in the brutal Arab dictatorships that we funded and supported became apostates. We became defenders of the indefensible. We were apologists, as Christopher Hitchens shouted at me on a stage in Berkeley, “for suicide bombers.”
Because few cared to examine our activities in the Muslim world, the attacks became certified as incomprehensible by the state and its lap dogs, the press. Those who carried out the attacks were branded as rising out of a culture and religion that was at best primitive and probably evil. The Quran—although it forbids suicide as well as the murder of women and children—was painted as a manual for fanaticism and terror. The attackers embodied the titanic clash of civilizations, the cosmic battle under way between good and evil, the forces of light and darkness. Images of the planes crashing into the towers and heroic rescuers emerging from the rubble were played and replayed. We were deluged with painful stories of the survivors and victims. The deaths and falling towers became iconographic. The ceremonies of remembrance were skillfully hijacked by the purveyors of war and hatred. They became vehicles to justify doing to others what had been done to us. And as innocents died here, soon other innocents began to die in the Muslim world. A life for a life. Murder for murder. Death for death. Terror for terror.
What was played out in the weeks after the attacks was the old, familiar battle between force and human imagination, between the crude instruments of violence and the capacity for empathy and understanding. Human imagination lost. Coldblooded reason, which does not speak the language of the imagination, won. We began to speak and think in the empty, mindless nationalist clichés about terror that the state handed to us. We became what we abhorred. The deaths were used to justify pre-emptive war, invasion, Shock and Awe, prolonged occupation, targeted assassinations, torture, offshore penal colonies, gunning down families at checkpoints, massive aerial bombardments, drone attacks, missile strikes and the killing of dozens and soon hundreds and then thousands and later tens of thousands and finally hundreds of thousands of innocent people. We produced piles of corpses in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan, and extended the reach of our killing machine to Yemen and Somalia. And by beatifying our dead, by cementing into the national psyche fear and the imperative of permanent war, and by stoking our collective humiliation, the state carried out crimes, atrocities and killings that dwarfed anything carried out against us on 9/11. The best that force can do is impose order. It can never elicit harmony. And force was justified, and is still justified, by the first dead. Ten years later these dead haunt us like Banquo’s ghost.
“It is the first death which infects everyone with the feelings of being threatened,” wrote Elias Canetti. “It is impossible to overrate the part played by the first dead man in the kindling of wars. Rulers who want to unleash war know very well that they must procure or invent a first victim. It needs not be anyone of particular importance, and can even be someone quite unknown. Nothing matters except his death; and it must be believed that the enemy is responsible for this. Every possible cause of his death is suppressed except one: his membership of the group to which one belongs oneself.”
We were unable to accept the reality of this anonymous slaughter. We were unable because it exposed the awful truth that we live in a morally neutral universe where human life, including our life, can be snuffed out in senseless and random violence. It showed us that there is no protection, not from God, fate, luck, omens or the state.
We have still not woken up to whom we have become, to the fatal erosion of domestic and international law and the senseless waste of lives, resources and trillions of dollars to wage wars that ultimately we can never win. We do not see that our own faces have become as contorted as the faces of the demented hijackers who seized the three commercial jetliners a decade ago. We do not grasp that Osama bin Laden’s twisted vision of a world of indiscriminate violence and terror has triumphed. The attacks turned us into monsters, grotesque ghouls, sadists and killers who drop bombs on village children and waterboard those we kidnap, strip of their rights and hold for years without due process. We acted before we were able to think. And it is the satanic lust of violence that has us locked in its grip.
As Wordsworth wrote:
Action is transitory—a step, a blow,
The motion of a muscle—this way or that—
’Tis done; and in the after-vacancy
We wonder at ourselves like men betrayed:
Suffering is permanent, obscure and dark,
And has the nature of infinity.
We could have gone another route. We could have built on the profound sympathy and empathy that swept through the world following the attacks. The revulsion over the crimes that took place 10 years ago, including in the Muslim world, where I was working in the weeks and months after 9/11, was nearly universal. The attacks, if we had turned them over to intelligence agencies and diplomats, might have opened possibilities not of war and death but ultimately reconciliation and communication, of redressing the wrongs that we commit in the Middle East and that are committed by Israel with our blessing. It was a moment we squandered. Our brutality and triumphalism, the byproducts of nationalism and our infantile pride, revived the jihadist movement. We became the radical Islamist movement’s most effective recruiting tool. We descended to its barbarity. We became terrorists too. The sad legacy of 9/11 is that the assholes, on each side, won.
Chris Hedges
ENJOYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!
Sincerelyours
And Blessed Are The Ones Who Care For Their Fellow Men!
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