Alex Veldhof
It is September 11th. Suddenly, an aeroplane speeds just above the city; people scream, untold numbers die and there is terrible destruction. Quickly it became apparent that the perpetrators of this barbarian terror were far away. 'Yes, in Afghanistan', you say. You say that because for the last six months you have been horribly brainwashed by radio, TV and the press, all of which claim to be objective, but in fact present a practically one-sided view: propaganda.
We are all brainwashed, one more than another, no matter how much we have presumably learned to be watchful. However, you have not been watchful enough; you have allowed yourself to be swept up by propaganda in thinking that the perpetrators of terror are per se Moslems, Arabs, Afghanis, Iraqis, etc.
The terrible incident that I described to you did not happen on 11 September last year, but on 11 September 1973. And the terrorists were not in Afghanistan, but in Washington, in the White House. There were a number of gentlemen in the White House, under the leadership of Henry Kissinger, who had decided that the government of Salvadore Allende had to be eliminated. Assassination was not to be shunned.
Allende was eliminated, and not only Allende.
15 April 1986 is another one of these dates on which international terror struck.
I remember that date so well because I was still employed by the Labour Party in the Lower House of the Dutch parliament at that time.
On that 15th of April, American bombers, under the command of Ronald Reagan, attacked two Libyan cities, Benghasi and Tripoli. Why? Because two American servicemen had been killed in Berlin. There were more than 300 Libyans killed, and what perhaps the worst is in this terrorist attack, is that Reagan gave the order to eliminate Gadaffi's family. His adopted daughter was killed in this attack. This was a reprisal which is in flagrant discord with international law. We can recall from Vietnam that also after the Americans had withdrawn, a few dead Americans were considerably more important than the lives of thousands of Vietnamese. Although Reagan denied it, an investigation by 150 American journalists uncovered the fact that the murder was actually planned.
Bin Laden's guilt of the murder of more than 3000 people in New York still has to be proved. Reagan's guilt of the murder of more than 300 people in Lybia has been proven; he gave the orders. Moreover, this President is guilty of the more than 50,000 deaths in Nicaragua which were the result of an illegal intervention in an independent country. There is now a hunt for Bin Laden by the same regime that still harbours the likes of Reagan, Kissinger and the countless mercenaries who the American government used for murder attacks, or attempts thereof, on foreign heads of government, among whom Lumumba and Castro.
Why, when all the governments in the so-called 'free West' mention international terrorism do they never bring up the above noted terrorism? This is because we in the West use the concepts of terrorism and international terrorism extremely selectively. Our aggressions are peace operations; psychological propaganda means nothing. We only carry out operations, sometimes a reprisal. The retaliation of our adversaries may not be called a reprisal, it is terrorism, just as their operations are terror.
A few months ago in Amsterdam, an Israeli, Uri Avneri, said that for all parties, and he did not exclude his own country in this, it is always one's adversaries who are the terrorists.
Reflection on the concepts of terror and violence does not seem to occur. That would disturb the image that propaganda created for us. Two Americans who are aware of the propaganda value of the concepts of terrorism and terror are David Barash and Charles Webel of the University of California at Berkeley. They suggest that the words 'terror' and 'terrorism' should be put in quotations since 'Americans might well be served by introducing greater historical and more cross-cultural sensitivity into their thinking'.
Another American, Ted Gur, offers a definition of political violence in his book 'Why Men Rebel' that contains societal attacks on important political figures, in particular agents of the state. Charles Tilly, notes, in my view correctly, that an important category of political violence, that of agents of the state, never enters the picture The majority of the murders, says Tilly, are committed by the military, police and other specialised forces of repression. This is something that presents itself in the definition of terror. It might be more correct not to speak of a problem presenting itself, but to state, as Edward Herman does, that politics in the West deliberately defines terrorism so that their own violence falls outside of their own choice of the definition of terrorism. It is difficult to adopt any other position if they want to preserve the illusion that one's own interventions are exercises that serve only peace and safety. In the last hundred years, the United States have, as no other nation, been occupied with interventions that serve its foreign policy.
Support for contra-revolutionary movements has become a normal line of conduct for the American government in cases where the ruling bourgeoisie, which is aligned with American politics, is threatened by foreign forces. These interventions have cost hundreds of thousands of lives. In Guatemala and Honduras, hundreds of thousands of people have been slaughtered by terrorists who were trained in the CIA training camp in Texas; slaughtered by the same government that feels it must fire cruise missiles on the Taliban's training camps.
Hundreds of thousands of victims, such as a half-million dead children in Iraq as a result of sanctions, are no doubt worth the price to the American government, according to Madelaine Albright, in an infamous interview by Leslie Stahl on the TV programme '60 Minutes'. We can only guess whether Bin Laden found the more that 3000 victims in New York worth the price.
To sketch what might await us, I would like to point out a letter that appeared in the Blätter fur deutsche und internationale Politik (2001 9, page 1059, 1060). It was a copy of a letter to the prime minister of Germany, Gerhard Schröder, written by Willy Wimmer, a member of the German Parlement, for the Christen Demokratische Union, and member of the Parlementarische Versammlung der OSZE.
The letter-writer refers to a conference that took place in the Slovakian capital, Bratislava, organised by the department of foreign affairs of the US and the American Enterprise Institute (a foreign-affairs arm of the Republican Party). Its subject was the Balkans and expansion of NATO. Numerous Prime Ministers and ministers for foreign affairs from the region were present.
The propaganda there was shocking. I quote Wimmer:
"The Conference demands a speedy recognition of Kosovo, according to international law. Yugoslavia must be kept out of every rule - of - law organ, and especially out of the Helsinki accords.
European rule of law is a hindrance to NATO. The American system of law is therefore more suitable for Europe. The war against Yugoslavia was fought to rectify an incorrect decision of General Eisenhower during World War II. In this manner, the faulty determination has been corrected. Europeans may legalistically reason that this war against Yugoslavia, which was outside the treaty's domain, was an exception. However, it is clear that this is a precedent which they can and will call upon at any moment. The area between the Baltic and Anatolia should be filled by NATO, as it was during the height of the Roman Empire.
In the long run, Serbia must be kept out of European development to further the safety of the American military presence".
After offering this impression of the conference, Wimmer ends his letter with the following observation.
'The American side seems to be conscious, in the context of, and in order to pursue her interests, wanting to undermine the rule of law developed as a result of the two World Wars. Power must be above justice. Where international law stands in the way, it must be liquidated.
When a similar development was embraced by the League of Nations, the second World War was not far away. A manner of thinking that puts self-interest in such an absolute position can not be called anything but totalitarian."
This was not written by a left-extremist (since as you know anyone who is not for us is against us, and thus an extremist), but was written by a Member of Parliament for the CDU.
The conference which argues for an American rule-of-law to be imposed on Europe, which is what it means, unfortunately offers an image that slowly seems to doom Europe.
In fact, the events of 11 September 2001, were in many countries seized as an opportunity to shift to measures which are incongruent with the rule of law that had been in effect until that moment.
The dangerous virus infecting international-law has also spread to national law, and not only in the United States, but in many other countries as well. Propaganda, one- sided information and the falsifications in our media, all lend a hand to it. In the Netherlands, Moroccan youths, who could understand the attacks of 11 September, were invited for a talk by a Minister. However, the much larger group of Dutch people who, according to surveys, were in agreement with the American aggression against Afghanistan, for which there was no mandate from the Security Council, as opposed to what the propaganda would have us believe, those Dutch people were not invited for a talk with the Minister.
Everything becomes crueller when one thinks that our Minister for Foreign Affairs proffered his complete agreement with the American cruise missile terror-attacks on Sudan and Afghanistan, which reduces all indignation about the Taliban to hypocrisy. Needless to say that this Minister was also not invited by his colleague for a talk.
This fits the picture; aggression and terror from an adversary must be fought, but our aggression and terror are holy; they serve the well being of the world.
I thought that having sympathies and antipathies were not punishable in my country, except for the Nazi occupation. However, recently a police officer was suspended from duty because she refused to participate in the three-minutes of silence regarding 11 September. Fortunately, the police department was forced to restore her to duty. However, she was transferred to another department because 'work relations were disturbed'. This is in fact a case of co-workers, who would appear to be brainwashed and spiritually empty, victimising the victim, if not worse. And this all happened within a police-apparatus, which is meant to uphold the law.
The head of a high school in Amsterdam was in the news because he refused to compel his students to the three-minute silence. I would like to see, he said, if there will be three-minute silence when they drop the bombs in Afghanistan. That three-minutes of silence did indeed not occur, although the Americans and their allies (their'client states', as Chomsky says) have created more victims in Afghanistan than the Taliban did in America.
Since 11 September of last year, more anti-terror laws have been adopted in Great Britain, which according to the lawyer, Garreth Peirth, would not be out of judicial place in a dictatorship. In fact, from what I have heard from divers Labour MP's, Tony Blair behaves like a dictator. He too, just as Clinton and Bush do, deals with international law opportunistically, and continues bombing Iraq and is party to the war on Afghanistan.
Plus royaliste que le roi, he appears to want to outdo Bush. Like lame sheep, Labour MP's (fortunately not all of them) vote for his laws. In the meantime, the telephone of a member of the House of Lords, Lord Ahmed of Rotherham, is tapped.
Brian Iddin, a Labour MP, announced that since the laws were adopted eight people have been put behind bars. Mockingly, he said that all the back-bencher's telephones should be tapped because then 'at least they would listen to us'. In Washington, a woman member of the Senate had to be brought home under police protection because she had, 'in the land of freedom', refused to vote for the new anti-terrorist laws that Bush had proposed.
The hunt for the people who spread the anthrax virus (or those believed to have done so) increases the hypocritical tension. Why, hypocritical? I will tell you a fairy-tale.
The Sorcerer and His Pupils.
We let our story begin in 1967. To wipe out the Vietcong, and the population which supported the Vietcong, the US army thought fragmentation bombs and napalm were not enough. Stronger chemical and bacteriological weapons were to be used. Forests were defoliated, the rice fields of the farmers were poisoned. They got the poison not by letter as one might think, but by air; still, a kind of airmail.
Special planes of the US Airforce destroyed (by poisoning) about one million hectares of fertile land (one -hectare equals about 12 thousand square yards). Tens of thousands of Vietnamese became lifelong invalids…
The production of chemical and biological weapons reached a summit in 1967. Huge sums of money were spent on the production of substances which cause highly dangerous diseases like yellow fever, dysentery and plague. They were to be used in a later stage of the war. 8000 American scientists (17 of them were recipients of the Nobel Prize), felt the danger was so acute, that they called on President Johnson to stop the production of chemical and bacteriological weapons.The President refused.
In March 1967, the President got an extra 12 -billion dollars from Congress for the expansion of the war in Vietnam. Now the pupils are grown up, they no longer need the wise lessons of their master, the sorcerer. What the pupils can say is, 'We are not the first bio-terrorists in the world'.
Recently in Philadelphia, I talked to Edward Herman, whom I mentioned earlier. Herman is an expert in terrorism and has published many works, some together with Noam Chomsky. He reminded me that Chomsky and he, more than 20 years ago had called the US 'the major terrorist country in the world'. Chomsky talks about his government as 'the gangsters in the White House'.
Those who are at all familiar with the history of terrorism will have to agree that Chomsky is correct. "When we think of crimes against humanity", says Michael Tigar, professor of law at the University of Washington, "we must remember that governments and governmental groups are the most dangerous criminals. They have the most power to inflict harm, and are the most likely to be recidivists. State-sponsored terrorism is the most dangerous brand, especially when it masquerades as justice", according to Tigar during a meeting held at Washington DC, in October of last year.
Herman has, in the past frequently pointed out that human rights always fall into the last place for the American government. The criteria of business as well as military considerations determine whether there is support or opposition for any regime. Since 1945, political violence under the protection of the United States has grown tremendously.
Barrington Moore Junior, pointed out in 1966, during the Cold War, that communist repression was generally limited to its own populations. While liberal repression (among which the earlier liberalism as well as the current liberalism against revolutionary movements in underdeveloped areas) is predominantly aimed outside its borders, thus at other populations, this according to Barrington Moore.
The economic interests of capitalism, the business criteria of which Herman speaks, demand a world-wide network of bases in order to safeguard those interests. The most recent example of these is Afghanistan.
Unocal, a California consortium, which had plans for a gas transport-pipeline through Afghanistan, pulled out of negotiations in 1998, after years of unproductive bargaining. It withdrew after Clinton's cruise missile attack on Bin Laden's training camps. Unocal said that it would wait until there was peace and stability in Afghanistan, and a government recognised by the US. In this rather uncertain language, Unocal meant that America should be dominating Afghanistan.
That opportunity seems to be present now. Closed societies such as in Afghanistan must be annihilated because they form an obstacle on the road to globalisation. If this can not be accomplished in a peaceful manner, if necessarily by bribery, then, by violence.
If, somewhere in the world, the CIA is not successful in squashing internal revolution, then Washington always has a few bombers ready. Therefore the terrorist attack on New York struck the government in Washington as 'gefundenes Fressen', as the Germans say, as an outside chance. It saved the propaganda machine in Washington a lot of work. There was no longer a complicated explanation necessary for the attack on Afghanistan.
It is hardly possible to be more concise than Noam Chomsky, when he said in the 90's, 'The US is a terrorist state by right. That is unchallengeable doctrine'.
The accusations and judgements of Chomsky and Herman are not based on 'facts' with a dubious truth-content, as are so often hurled, especially lately, by the American government and then eagerly taken over by the those such as Great Britain, and it saddens me to say, the Netherlands, which appears to stand in Washington's books as a loyal ally (read satellite) of the United States.
To those who find the liquidation of heads of state of foreign powers not to be classifiable under gangster methods, I would like to ask if they have a pleasanter word for political assassination. And to those who think the regime in Washington is unjustly accused of terror and aggression for the turning into rubble of the television studios and other buildings in Belgrade, which was so fanatically defended by the leaders of our government, or the bombing of Benghasi and Tripoli, or firing cruise-missiles on Afghanistan and Sudan a few years ago is not aggression and terror, may I invite to listen to what the American Code of Conduct says about terrorism.
An 'act of terrorism' means an activity that - (A) involves a violent act or an act dangerous to human life that is a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or any State, or that would be a criminal violation if committed within the jurisdiction of the United States or of any State; and (B) appears to be intended (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population, (ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by assassination or kidnapping.
This Code of Conduct was adopted by the American Congress in 1984. However, as anyone can know, the government in Washington ignores not only international law, but also its own code of law.
The last sentence of this Code of Conduct: 'An act of terrorism means an activity to affect the conduct of a government by assassination or kidnapping' may be clear to all of us, but is not so for the leaders of the 'free world'. They find assassination justifiable, at least 'our' assassinations, but not those of the Taliban and other adversaries since those murders are placed in the category of terrorism. I have already said that our definitions are so fabricated that we always come out completely clean. That is why in the country that calls itself the 'greatest democracy in the world' and the 'land of freedom' there can be discussion on the desirability of assassination.
To illustrate this, I offer some quotations from a ponderous report of some 350 pages from the Select Committee of the United States Senate on 'alleged assassination plots involving foreign leaders'.
In a introduction the Committee says that 'the Committee has received evidence that ranking government officials discussed and may have authorized, the establishment within the CIA of a generalized assassination capacity'. Those, who regard themselves as leaders of the free world, see it as totally normal, as the report indicates, to deliberate whether its information service should be equipped with a couple of murderers, who in a revealing use of language are described as having 'generalized assassination capability'.
In a personal epilogue, Senator Barry Goldwater writes that 'the Committee has received evidence that a "higher authority" than the CIA ordered the removal by whatever means of the late African leader Patrice Lumumba'. On 17 January 1961, Lumumba was murdered in Katanga. The contractor, as we know with great certainty, also from this report, was Dwight D Eisenhower, who was President at the time. 'Most of the American Presidents are war criminals', Chomsky said in one of his books.
Goldwater writes further:
'The select Committee has received circumstantial evidence that Attorney General Robert Kennedy was aware of the attempts on Fidel Castro's life before, during, and after they occurred.
When the Select Committee decided to conduct an investigation into assassinations I warned the Committee that Presidential involvement or authority was a certainty. Moreover I was very concerned that harm would come to the office of the Presidency giving comfort to our Nation's detractors and enemies."
So much for Barry Goldwater, who apparently thinks it is more important that his president can claim to the outside world to be unblemished than to worry about the deaths of which that same President is guilty.
In fact, the morality of many leaders that comes out in the report is that murder is not so terrible, if our enemies do not get word of it. However, it must be said that there are a few who do not want assassination on their consciences.
One who does not have a problem with assassination is the current American Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld. In an interview, he recently indicated that it would be best if Bin Laden were killed. He added reassuringly that that was actually not politically correct, but that it would be best.
I will spare you from further detail of the Committee's report from which I have quoted several details to let you become aware of the type of ally with whom we are fighting the battle for peace and justice.
Often I am accused of being anti-American. I do not regard that as an indictment; I would blame myself if that were not true. I am anti-American in the sense that I am against the establishment in Washington, which an American like Chomsky has referred to as the 'gangsters in the White House'. I am against the politicians in this world who think that they have more rights than others. I am against those in this world who think that they must use their bombers everywhere to attack, but that their victims do not have the right to retaliate. I am against those who feel they have the right to invade countries all over the world and kidnap their leaders, and have the right to hijack their planes with their fighter-jets. I am against those who on the one occasion present their pursuit for hegemony as a battle against communism and on the other as a battle against terrorism, and in that pursuit sacrifice the lives of hundreds of thousands.
In this sense I am anti-American, but I am on the side of those Americans who try to make their country a decent one. That is why I am on the side of Noam Chomsky, Professor Emeritus of linguistics at M.I.T., who has fought his whole life against the terror and aggression with which the American government has repeatedly confronted the world. Moreover, I am on the side of Edward Herman, of the University of Pennsylvania; and on the side of Richard Falk of Princeton University (School of International Relations). Years ago, he wrote that in his country the use of violence and terror in international politics was judged according to the criteria of effectiveness and cost, and not according to the norms that proceed from convictions of law, morality, religious and cultural values, as they should in a decent country.
I am on the side of the New York woman, Judy Keane, who lost her husband when the World Trade Centre collapsed, but who did not want reprisal because, as she said to a reporter from the Washington Post, 'The World Trade Centre attack was a retaliation for something else, and that was the retaliation for something else. Are we going to continue this in perpetuity?" Judy Keane is smarter than George Bush.
And of course I am on the side of my friends at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, who, for years, have been fighting the dishonest propaganda of their government and demonstrating against the capitalist globalisation of which the World Bank and the I.M.F. are the pillars.
Last year, as a guest of the Institute for Policy Studies, I was present at the memorial remembrance of the murder in Washington, 25 years ago, of Orlando Letelier, the former ambassador from Chile to the United States and minister for foreign affairs. He was killed by Chile's secret service in co-operation with the CIA, as is now clear from the talks that Henry Kissinger had with various functionaries, which have been described in the above mentioned Senate Committee report.
One of the speakers at the memorial was Michael Tigar, whom I mentioned earlier. Tigar, a lawyer and Professor of Law at the American University in Washington is preparing a criminal process against Kissinger, whom he holds responsible for the murder of Salvadore Allende and for terror against the people of Chile. Tigar:
"Fighting terrorism means stripping state-sponsored terrorists of their impunity and bringing them to justice, Pinochet and yes, Kissinger. Fighting terrorism means shining a light into the darkest corners of human existence and bringing a real promise of human rights to all the world's people, so that desperate men and women are not driven to follow leaders whose only real message is vengeance."
That was Micheal Tigar, who offers us another, and more objective image of terrorism than the one that the daily propaganda produces. We should remember that the so-called terrorists as well as the so-called anti-terrorists, whoever they may be, maintain that terrorism should be fought.
Our leaders in Europe should listen to those Americans who call upon everyone, we Europeans as well, to raise our voices against the warmongers of today who think they can fight terrorism with terrorism. As long as the largest terrorist-network in the world exterminates hundreds of thousands of people from behind its desks, as long as we in the West support these major terrorists, that is how long the minor terrorists will not stop.
I heard Chomsky say it more concisely in Pakistan: "The best way to combat terrorism is not to take part in it".
Alex Veldhof (Netherlands)