Monstrous Offences

The United States' official reaction to former MP Michael Meacher's remarks concerning September 11 and the "War On Terror" were, predictably, hostile and embittered:

Mr. Meacher's fantastic allegations -- especially his assertion that the U.S. government knowingly stood by while terrorists killed some 3,000 innocents in New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia -- would be monstrous, and monstrously offensive, if they came from someone serious or credible.

But cigarettes, the "most important cause of premature death in developed countries" kill about 500,000 innocent Americans per year. That's a September 11 every two days, for as far as the eye can see. 100,000 innocent Americans per year die for want of access to health care. Traffic accidents claim about 40,000 innocent American lives each year. Roughly 6,000 innocent Americans are killed in the workplace each year. Innocent New Yorkers were exposed to "brutal" air conditions following the September 11 attacks -- but the EPA, under orders from the White House, insisted the air was safe to breathe. On the other coast, "L.A. is so toxic that a child born in the city of angels will inhale more cancer-causing pollutants in the first two weeks of life than the EPA...considers safe for a lifetime." The full toll upon innocent Americans from eating genetically modified and pesticide-laden foods, not to mention "mad" cows is as yet unknown -- but don't hold your breath waiting for benign results. One could probably think of examples like these all the day long -- to say nothing of the nation's disgraceful record of under-educating, overworking, impoverishing, and imprisoning its beleaguered proles.

In the absence of a proclamation of a grandiose "war" by the Bush Administration upon Big Tobacco, Big Auto, Big Ag, Big Oil, et al. (indeed, given the outright collusion of Big Government with these industries), one can only conclude that the Administration could give a fuck how many innocents are killed unnecessarily in the U.S. of A..

So there really shouldn't be any doubt the government wouldn't have any second thoughts knowingly standing by while terrorists killed 3,000 innocents. But did it do so?

Certainly the evidence and the unanswered questions -- from the "lucky coincidences", to the President's "movements and actions" on September 11, to the information available to intelligence agences (and the Administration itself) warning of imminent attacks, to the Cheney Energy Task Force's maps of Iraqi oilfields, to the subsequent appointments of oil industry insiders to top posts in Afghanistan, to Rumsfeld's "sweep it all up" memo, to the conflicts of interest, to the stifling of an independent investigation into the attacks -- is at the very least compelling.

For what it's worth, this blogger has flipped back (primarily thinking such a conspiracy would be dastardly difficult to cover up) and forth on the question. More "forth" than "back" these days.

But the first suspicions, birthed well before the evidence noted above started coming to light, and based simply on the illogicality of the Administration's reaction to the attacks, continue to gnaw.

The lies and double-standards concerning the attacks -- and the motives behind them -- in relation to the United States' very well-documented record in engaging in and sponsoring acts of terrorism much more numerous and devastating that anything attributable to bin Laden and co., as well as its continued "harboring" of known terrorists were one thing. Regrettable, but not surprising -- and not really illogical on their own terms. (That is to say, if you ignore the absurdity of declaring "war" on a concept or a sub-state organisation, and if "terrorism" by definition precludes the activities of the United States and its "allies", then, the current "War On Terror" makes perfect logical sense.)

Even the choice of targeting Afghanistan -- though none of the September 11 attackers, nor any of their funding, originated there -- had a kind of logic to it (if largely Orwellian), in that bin Laden was holed up there at the time. (Alas, refusing the Taliban's offers of extradition; ordering aid to the starving population cut off; bombing innocent civilians, including with uranium munitions and cluster bombs; allying with the murderous and hated "Northern Alliance"; and funding warlords didn't make much sense on the terms -- "infinite justice", for example -- that the Administration was touting.)

That said, the Administration's immediate reaction just didn't make much sense at all. It reacted as though September 11 had occurred in a vacuum -- that on September 10 everything was peachy, and on September 12 we were suddenly "at war" with the "terrorists" -- a war that, conveniently, was instantly scheduled to last the duration of our lifetimes.

The Administration is still more less holding to this line, prefacing its every action, no matter how vile or unrelated, with the line that, "September 11 has shewn that we are no longer insulated from attack..." Meaning, of course, upon American soil.

But given the World Trade Center bombing of 1993 (which, except for a minor miscalculation by the perpetrators, would have produced a far deadlier toll than did the September 11 attacks) coupled with bin Laden's repeated threats and the information concerning an imminent attack noted above, how could the Administration possibly have believed, on September 10, that the U.S. mainland was "safe"? Moreover, given the bin Laden-ites' record of attacking America's and its allies' "interests" -- the 1998 embassy bombings, the assassination of Sadat, the bombing of the Beirut barracks, the USS Cole attack, etc. (not to mention their U.S.-sponsored shenanigans in Afghanistan and Bosnia) -- the Administration line seems even more illogical.

The reaction was also practically inconsistent with the, "We wuz blindsided!" mantra. If, as the Administration would have us believe, the attacks were a completely out-of-the-blue surprise, how is it that the Administration was suddenly so materially prepared to engage in a "war on terror"? How could the Administration possibly have undertaken a major theater war half a world away, starting from scratch on September 12, in less than a month? Logistically impossible, no? (If, however, it had begun planning an invasion the previous summer, and if both American and British troops and materiel had been deployed to the region for long-planned war games, perhaps not so impossible....) Additionally, how could the PATRIOT Act have been conceived and drafted wholly from scratch, and then put through congress in just a few weeks' time?

Mix these inconsistencies -- and the monumental increase in terror thereby engendered -- with the Administration's over-the-top self-righteousness and the hard evidence of "coincidental" malfeasance, and you've got a recipe for...yeah, gnawing suspicions.

Many on the left have argued that September 11 was a "gift" for the Administration -- allowing it to undertake programmes it desperately wanted to, but otherwise never could, have undertaken. Perhaps the explanation for the Administration's actions is as "harmless" as that. But this analysis doesn't seem, to this blogger at any rate, to hold up to either logical or evidentiary scrutiny.

In a sense, it doesn't matter: the "War On Terror", as practised by the Bush Administration, is insanely criminal and deserving of the strongest possible opposition whether or not the Administration was complicit in the September 11 attacks. Any "war on terror" which doesn't include among its target the terrorists living large in this nation's capital is (to use Meacher's word) "bogus".

But in another sense, it could matter. If "smoking" evidence of Bush Administration complicity does in time surface, it would surely spell the end of the Administraion's ideologues' utterly despicable dreams and schemes -- dreams and schemes, it might be worth noting, that the ideologues themselves acknowledged could never be put into place in the absence of "some catastrophic and catalysing event, like a new Pearl Harbor."

"Shit flows downstream", the saying goes. We shall see. (But in the meantime, let's keep fucking off the Bush Administration in every way our imaginations and energies allow, okay?)

Posted by Eddie Tews at September 16, 2003 12:05 PM