Tuesday’s defense of President Obama from Andrew Sullivan is
devoted to refuting Conor Friedersdorf’s
criticism of Obama’s drone program. Says Sullivan:
(Credit: Reuters/Pete Souza/The White House)
What frustrates me about Conor’s position – and Greenwald’s as well –
is that it kind of assumes 9/11 didn’t happen or couldn’t happen again,
and dismisses far too glibly the president’s actual responsibility as
commander-in-chief to counter these acts of mass terror.
This is exactly backward. I absolutely believe that another 9/11 is
possible. And the reason I believe it’s so possible is that people like
Andrew Sullivan —
and George Packer
— have spent the last decade publicly cheering for American violence
brought to the Muslim world, and they continue to do so (now more than
ever under Obama). Far from believing that another 9/11 can’t happen,
I’m amazed that it hasn’t already, and am quite confident that at some
point it will. How could any rational person expect their government to
spend a full decade (and counting) invading, droning, cluster-bombing,
occupying, detaining without charges, and indiscriminately shooting
huge numbers
of innocent children, women and men in multiple countries and not have
its victims and their compatriots be increasingly eager to return the
violence?
Just consider what one single, isolated attack on American soil more
than a decade ago did to Sullivan, Packer and company: the desire for
violence which that one attack 11 years ago unleashed is seemingly
boundless by time or intensity. Given the ongoing American quest for
violence from that one-day attack, just imagine the impact which
continuous attacks over the course of a
full decade
must have on those whom we’ve been invading, droning,
cluster-bombing, occupying, detaining without charges, and
indiscriminately shooting.
How could any rational person expect their
government to spend a full decade (and counting) invading, droning,
cluster-bombing, occupying, detaining without charges, and
indiscriminately shooting huge numbers
of innocent children, women and men in multiple countries and not have
its victims and their compatriots be increasingly eager to return the
violence?
One of the many reasons I oppose Obama’s ongoing aggression is
precisely that I believe the policies Sullivan and Packer cheer will
cause another 9/11 (the other reasons include the lawlessness of it, the
imperial mindset driving it, the large-scale civilian deaths it causes,
the extreme and unaccountable secrecy with which it’s done, the erosion
of civil liberties that inevitably accompanies it, the patently
criminal
applications of these weapons, the
precedent
it sets, etc.). I realize that screaming “9/11″ has been the trite
tactic of choice for those seeking to justify the U.S. Government’s
militarism over the last decade, but invoking that event strongly
militates against the policies it’s invoked to justify, precisely
because those policies are the principal cause of such attacks, for
obvious reasons.
In fact, one need not “imagine” anything. One can simply look at the
explanations given by virtually every captured individual accused of
attempting serious Terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. The Times Square
bomber, the Pakistani-American Faisal Shahzad,
said this:
As soon as he was taken into custody May 3 at John F. Kennedy
International Airport, onboard a flight to Dubai, the Pakistani-born
Shahzad told agents that he was motivated by opposition to U.S. policy in the Muslim world, officials said.
“One of the first things he said was, ‘How would you feel if people attacked the United States? You are attacking a sovereign Pakistan’,”
said one law enforcement official, who spoke on condition of anonymity
because the interrogation reports are not public. “In the first two
hours, he was talking about his desire to strike a blow against the
United States for the cause.”
When the federal judge who sentenced Shahzad asked with disgust how
he could try to detonate bombs knowing that innocent children would die,
he replied: “
Well, the drone hits in Afghanistan and Iraq, they
don’t see children, they don’t see anybody. They kill women, children,
they kill everybody.” Those statements are consistent with a
decade’s worth of emails and other private communications from Shahzad,
as he railed with increasing fury against the wars in Afghanistan and
Iraq, drone attacks in Pakistan, Israeli violence against Palestinians
and Muslims generally, Guantanamo and torture, and asked: “Can you tell
me a way to save the oppressed? And a
way to fight back when rockets are fired at us and Muslim blood flows?”
Najibullah Zazi, one of the first Afghans ever to be accused of
Terrorism on U.S. soil when he plotted to detonate bombs in the New York
subway system, was
radicalized by the U.S. occupation of his country (“This is the payback for the atrocities that you do,”
he said). Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP)
expressly said that the Christmas Day bomb attempt by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was in retaliation for the
Obama cluster-bomb airstrike
in Yemen that killed dozens of women and children along with U.S.
support for the Yemeni dictator. The Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan was
motivated by “the killing of Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
Anwar Awlaki was
once such a moderate that he vehemently denounced the 9/11 attacks, got
invited to the Pentagon to speak, and
hosted a column in
The Washington Post on
Islam — but then became radicalized by the constant post-9/11 killing
of Muslims by his country (the U.S.). David Rodhe, the former
New York Times reporter who was held hostage by the Taliban for nine months,
said after he was released that Taliban “commanders
fixated on the deaths of Afghan, Iraqi and Palestinian civilians in military airstrikes, as well as the
American detention of Muslim prisoners who had been held for years without being charged.”
Even
The Washington Post just two weeks ago
pointed out that
the primary source of strength for AQAP — the Terror group which the
U.S. Government insists is the greatest threat to the U.S. — are
repeated U.S. drone strikes in Yemen; said
The Post: “An escalating campaign of U.S. drone strikes is
stirring
increasing sympathy for al-Qaeda-linked militants and driving tribesmen
to join a network linked to terrorist plots against the United States.” In late 2009 — almost three years ago –
The New York Times pointed out exactly
the same thing when quoting a Yemeni official after Obama’s
civilian-killing cluster bomb attack (“The problem is that the
involvement of the United States
creates sympathy for Al Qaeda“).
Even Sullivan acknowledges: “there does seem a danger, especially in
Yemen, that drones may be focusing the Islamists’ attention away from
their own government and onto ours.”
In other words, the very policies that Sullivan and Packer adore are
exactly the ones that make another 9/11 so likely. Running around
screaming “9/11″ at Obama critics to justify his ongoing American
violence in the Muslim world is like running around screaming “lung
cancer” to justify heavy cigarette smoking. It isn’t those of us who
oppose American aggression in the Muslim world who need manipulative,
exploitative reminders about 9/11; it’s those who cheer for these
policies who are making a follow-up attack ever more likely.
Read the full article with updates at Salon.com
© 2012 Salon.com
Glenn Greenwald was previously a constitutional law and civil
rights litigator in New York. He is the author of the New York Times
Bestselling book "
How Would a Patriot Act?," a critique of the Bush administration's use of executive power, released in May 2006. His second book, "
A Tragic Legacy", examines the Bush legacy. His just-released book is titled
"With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful." He is the recipient of the first annual I.F. Stone Award for Independent Journalism.
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