Category Archives: 9/11

The nameless years

Decade in review: the nameless years
By Paul Woodward, The National, January 1, 2010

In a sign that this was a decade that many people would sooner forget, the 2000s came to an end without finding a name.

For Alan Philips, writing in The National: “The defining characteristic of the past 10 years is how much we have been deceived – by political leaders, economic gurus and indeed by ourselves. It has been a decade of deception.”

Time magazine declared under a headline reading Goodbye (at last) to the Decade from Hell: “Bookended by 9/11 at the start and a financial wipeout at the end, the first 10 years of this century will very likely go down as the most dispiriting and disillusioning decade Americans have lived through in the post-World War II era.” [continued…]

Manhattan transfer

Manhattan transfer
By Dahlia Lithwick, Slate, November 16, 2009

Opposition to the Obama administration’s plan to try alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his confederates in a federal court in New York City is hardening into two camps. One is concerned that we may be unwittingly playing into the terrorists’ hands. The other is incensed that we already have. What both camps share, besides a kind of unhinged logic and complete disregard for the legal process, is an obsessive fascination with the accused. The result is a broad willingness to sacrifice our commitment to legal principles in favor of the symbolic satisfaction of crushing the hopes and dreams of a motley group of criminals.

Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, firmly in the first camp, is hopping mad that we are poised to make all the suspect’s dreams come true. As he said on ABC’s This Week: “Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, when he was first arrested, asked to be brought to New York. I didn’t think we were in the business of granting the requests of terrorists.”

Funny, that. I didn’t think we were in the business of caring one way or another what the terrorists want from us. The criminal justice system is as uninterested in advancing the goals of the accused as it is in frustrating them. The most vocal critics seem to forget that our legal system exists not to grant requests or dash hopes but to bring people to justice. [continued…]

9/11 trial poses unparalleled legal obstacles

9/11 trial poses unparalleled legal obstacles
By Eric Lichtblau and Benjamin Weiser, New York Times, November 14, 2009

How do you defend one of the most notorious terrorist figures in history?

One step, legal analysts say, may be to ask for a change of venue.

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed’s lawyers, whoever they are, will no doubt question whether he can get a fair trial from a jury sitting, as Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. noted, in a Manhattan courthouse “just blocks away from where the Twin Towers once stood.”

Then will come the inevitable challenges to interrogation methods used on Mr. Mohammed during more than six years in detention. The government has acknowledged waterboarding him 183 times to extract information about the Sept. 11 attacks, which he eventually admitted planning.

Finally, if Mr. Mohammed is convicted, defense lawyers will most likely plead for jurors in New York, historically more cautious about capital punishment than much of the rest of country, to spare the sentence of execution and send him to prison for the rest of his life instead. [continued…]

How 9/11 should be remembered

How 9/11 should be remembered
By Rebecca Solnit, TomDispatch, September 10, 2009

Eight years ago, 2,600 people lost their lives in Manhattan, and then several million people lost their story. The al-Qaeda attack on the Twin Towers did not defeat New Yorkers. It destroyed the buildings, contaminated the region, killed thousands, and disrupted the global economy, but it most assuredly did not conquer the citizenry. They were only defeated when their resilience was stolen from them by clichés, by the invisibility of what they accomplished that extraordinary morning, and by the very word “terrorism,” which suggests that they, or we, were all terrified. The distortion, even obliteration, of what actually happened was a necessary precursor to launching the obscene response that culminated in a war on Iraq, a war we lost (even if some of us don’t know that yet), and the loss of civil liberties and democratic principles that went with it. [continued…]

Judge: CIA interrogations not relevant to 9/11 accused’s sanity

Judge: CIA interrogations not relevant to 9/11 accused’s sanity
By Carol Rsenberg, Miami Herald, August 10, 2009

US military defense lawyers for accused 9/11 conspirator Ramzi bin al Shibh cannot learn what interrogation techniques CIA agents used on the Yemeni before he was moved to Guantánamo to be tried as a terrorist, an Army judge has ruled.

Bin al Shibh, 37, is one of five men charged in a complex death penalty prosecution by military commission currently under review by the Obama administration. He allegedly helped organize the Hamburg, Germany, cell of the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers before the suicide mission that killed 2,974 people in New York, the Pentagon and Pennsylvania.

But his lawyers say he suffers a “delusional disorder,” and hallucinations in his cell at Guantánamo may leave him neither sane enough to act as his own attorney nor to stand trial. Prison camp doctors treat him with psychotropic drugs. [continued…]

EDITORIAL: Power, humiliation and torture

Power, humiliation and torture
By Paul Woodward, War in Context, April 19, 2009

In the wake of 9/11, no phrase more succinctly projected the upwelling of popular jingoism across the United States than the words “Power of Pride.”

America needed to reassert its potency after experiencing the insult and humiliation of witnessing its power simultaneously centralized and instantaneously crushed when two drab towers acquired their national and international iconic significance in the very same moment that they collapsed.

As American power symbolically turned to a cloud of dust, its leaders scurried around in a desperate effort to salvage their authority and reclaim their dominance.

It now appears that central to that process was a calculated effort through which senior members of the Bush administration would restore their own pride and purge their own humiliation by torturing those who had collaborated in the attacks.

The fact that the CIA’s torture program was claimed to merely use “harsh interrogation” techniques was not simply a way of asserting that the legal threshold of torture had not been crossed. By using the term “interrogation” the issue of sadistic retribution was effectively screened out of consideration.

Even those who were critical of the approach the administration had adopted were inclined to confine those criticisms to questions such as whether these coercive methods would have any chance of yielding valuable intelligence. Alternatively they might press a patriotic argument by suggesting that torture was un-American.

The assumption inside the administration was that if its harsh methods could be presented as having been effective in preventing subsequent acts of terrorism, then pragmatic Americans would have less concern about the moral qualms of the administration’s critics — individuals who could be dismissed as civil liberties fanatics.

The moral question of whether the state can be allowed to use torture as a method of extra-judicial punishment and retribution rarely if ever entered the debate. But the evidence now suggests that it should.

We now learn that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in March 2003 and Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times in August 2002.

The New York Times has reported:

Abu Zubaydah had provided much valuable information under less severe treatment, and the harsher handling produced no breakthroughs, according to one former intelligence official with direct knowledge of the case….

…the use of repeated waterboarding against Abu Zubaydah was ordered “at the direction of CIA headquarters,” and officials were dispatched from headquarters “to watch the last waterboard session.”

The memo, written in 2005 and signed by Steven G. Bradbury, who worked in the Office of Legal Counsel, concluded that the waterboarding was justified even if the prisoner turned out not to know as much as officials had thought.

And he did not, according to the former intelligence officer involved in the Abu Zubaydah case. “He pleaded for his life,” the official said. “But he gave up no new information. He had no more information to give.”

A line of command and a set of orders is one way of attempting to explain how it could come about that a man would be waterboarded day after day. Yet the significance of what was taking place at that time was implicit rather than explicit. What mattered most was what was left unstated.

Within a relatively short period, Zubaydah would have learned that as agonizing as waterboarding might be, it was something he could survive. In about the same amount of time, his torturers would have learned that there was no more information they could extract.

And yet the torture continued, day in, day out, multiple times a day.

Cheney knew. Bush knew. Rumsfeld knew.

Each day might yield no new intelligence but for those who had been most deeply humiliated by 9/11, unremitting waterboarding provided its own rewards.

To be able to say, “carry on” — with no reasonable justification — was to silently know: I have the power to exact retribution.

CAMPAIGN 08 & EDITOR’S COMMENT: American introspection

The ‘Wright problem’ belongs to America
By Charles Derber and Yale Magrass, Boston Globe, May 1, 2008

The mainstream media has been nearly unrelenting in its condemnation of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, forcing Senator Barack Obama to distance himself from someone he considered a mentor. But Obama’s “Wright problem” reveals a largely ignored national problem: the narrowing of public debate to exclude the possibility of speaking truthfully about the US role in the world. [complete article]

Editor’s Comment — Obama has said, “I don’t want to just end the war, but I want to end the mindset that got us into war in the first place.”

It’s a good line, but I don’t imagine he has any intention – at least not before getting elected – of digging too deeply into what that mindset really is.

Why?

Because that would require looking into what remains in many respects a taboo subject in American public discourse: the humiliation of 9/11.

The September 11 attacks are spoken of as an act of war, a day of infamy, an outrage, a tragedy, an attack on America, but not as a humiliation.

Yet the lust for revenge, the ubiquity of the “Power of Pride” bumper stickers, Bush’s declaration, “I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass” – all of these are expressions of wounded pride and humiliation.

The dust and rubble in which 3,000 people had met their hideous deaths was soon — and perhaps through some unwitting compulsion — to be likened to a place in which 60,000 Japanese civilians were killed by an American bomb 56 years earlier. No one said, this is our Hiroshima, but neither was there the suggestion that there might be something vaguely obscene about appropriating the name Ground Zero.

What was missing and through its absence enabled the formation of the mindset of war, was an open, honest and heartfelt acknowledgment of failure – failure of leadership, failure of understanding, failure of intelligence, failure of security, failure of engineering, failure of government.

When 9/11 called America to examine itself, it refused and that refusal set in motion everything that has followed.

CAMPAIGN 08 EDITORIAL: With attention to the unseen

Words in context
By Paul Woodward, War in Context, March 21, 2008

Suppose Thomas Jefferson and the other founding fathers of American democracy had been able to see into the future. As they looked forward to the America of 2008, what would have held their attention more firmly?

That the society they helped form was to make such significant advances towards equality that two people who once would not even have been able to vote would now be vying to become president?

Or, that a momentous democratic choice might hinge on the effect of a few emotive phrases uttered by a man not even running for office?

A couple of days ago in Time magazine, Joe Klein wrote:

Whether Obama survives now will depend on the most important and overlooked part of his speech [in Philadelphia] — the final section, in which he challenged the public and, especially, the media to stow the sensationalism: “We can play Reverend Wright’s sermons on every channel, every day … and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words,” he said. “But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election we’ll be talking about some other distraction … And nothing will change … Or, at this moment in this election, we can come together and say, ‘Not this time.'”

And that is the existential challenge of 2008: whether we will have a big election or a small one. Will we have a serious conversation about the enormous problems confronting the country — the wars, the economic crisis, the looming environmental cataclysm — or will we allow the same old carnival of swift boats and sound bites? The answer depends on the candidates, of course, and on the media — where cynicism too often passes for insight. But most of all, it depends on you.

Klein notes that Obama challenged the public “and especially the media” to turn away from the distractions that could prevent this from being “a big election,” yet he almost immediately lets the media off the hook. The existential challenge of 2008, he says, most of all “depends on you.”

Taken literally, that’s indisputable. We’re the ones who get to decide how we vote. Yet what Klein does — what everyone in the media does when their preeminent loyalty attaches to their paycheck — is to refuse to point a spotlight on the individuals who shape the news from the shadows.

In every single newsroom on every single day, commercial and political decisions are being made while cloaked under the pretense that events themselves are the overwhelming force that steers editorial judgment. But consider how little we actually know about the decision-making process that triggered what has become the most explosive story in the presidential campaign.

On Good Morning America on March 13, Brian Ross with the stealth of a terrorist who is just about to set off a bomb, uttered these seemingly innocent words: “… an ABC News review of more than a dozen sermons… ” — and we all know what followed.

What we don’t know, but what could be as illuminating as the DVDs themselves, is what led ABC News to be conducting a review of Rev Jeremiah Wright’s sermons in the first place.

For months, everyone who had been paying much attention knew that Wright’s connection with Obama had the potential to wreak political havoc. In an interview with the New York Times in March 2007, Rev Wright’s explanation for why he had been disinvited from Obama’s presidential announcement was that the senator had told him, “You can get kind of rough in the sermons, so what we’ve decided is that it’s best for you not to be out there in public.”

It was a decision that drew criticism from other black leaders because, as Al Sharpton put it, “the issue is standing by your own pastor.” A month earlier, a Rolling Stone article had identified Wright as an emblem of Obama’s “radical roots.” And a year later, Tim Russert as presidential debate moderator-cum-inquisitor had cited Wright in order to find out whether Obama was willing to denounce and reject Louis Farrakhan.

So, while every cable news channel has followed ABC News‘ lead and made Rev Wright campaign issue #1, no one has been pressing the ABC News investigative team to explain how exactly it came to set the political agenda.

Was the Good Morning America story the fruit of a tenacious piece of investigative journalism, or might it on the contrary have been an altogether lazy piece of journalism — a case of someone saying, “Here’s the ammo. All you need to do is load and fire”?

When news isn’t new then this issue of timing means that newsmaking is taking place inside the newsroom. The media has become manufacturer. Might we be allowed to become privy to the process?

For instance, it’s obvious why the ABC News editors would deem a line such as “America’s chickens are coming home to roost” as newsworthy. But how did they decide that most of what came immediately after that line was irrelevant. Would most Americans not have responded in a different way if they had then heard Wright say:

Violence begets violence. Hatred begets hatred. And terrorism begets terrorism. A white ambassador [Edward Peck] said that y’all, not a black militant. Not a reverend who preaches about racism. An ambassador whose eyes are wide open and who is trying to get us to wake up and move away from this dangerous precipice upon which we are now poised. The ambassador said the people we have wounded don’t have the military capability we have. But they do have individuals who are willing to die and take thousands with them. And we need to come to grips with that.

Rev Wright was telling his congregation, pay attention to this white man, Edward Peck. It’s worth listening to what he has to say. It’s worth taking into consideration the opinion of a man who had been the Deputy Director of the White House Task Force on Terrorism under President Ronald Reagan, former Deputy Coordinator, Covert Intelligence Programs at the State Department, U.S. Ambassador and Chief of Mission to Iraq (1977-1980), and a 32-year veteran of the Foreign Service. At least, as far as Rev Wright was concerned, Edward Peck was worth listening to and that’s what he told his congregation.

On October 8, 2001, on CNN, Peck was asked: “Wouldn’t this war against terrorism be a mistake if we stop at Osama bin Laden and don’t take out Saddam Hussein as well?”

Peck said it would not be a mistake because, “when you take out Saddam Hussein, the key question you have to ask then is, what happens after that? And we don’t have a clue. Nobody knows, but it’s probably going to be bad. And a lot of people are going to be very upset about that, because that really is not written into our role in this world is to decide who rules Iraq.”

Rev Wright suggested that “in the wake of the American tragedy” of 9/11, in a process of self-examination, it would really be in America’s interests to listen to people such as Edward Peck. ABC News and much of the rest of the media would rather that we pay attention to a few ill-chosen phrases.