[D66] The killing of bin Laden and the “war on terror”

[M. Kuiper]

Dank je wel voor dit artikel !
Een hoop interessante feiten op een rijtje.

Nu de getraumatiseerde Amerikaanse burgers bloed geproefd hebben, is er
misschien tijd voor bezinning.
Tijd om de War on Terror te stoppen, en realistisch te denken.
Terroristische moorden kosten minder mensenlevens dan criminele moorden.
De War on Terror is begonnen met 'slechts'  3000 doden maar heeft meer dan
een miljoen mensen het leven gekost.
Voor het merendeel vreedzame onschuldige burgers in verre landen. En 4500
westerse militairen.
"brown people" zou George Carlin zeggen.

En misschien is er nu tijd om de toenmalige machthebbers eens aan de tand te
voelen over hun rol op 11 september 2001.

groet,
Micha Kuiper

PS

- George Carlin (eerste golf oorlog)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzrQSba-1k4

- President George Bush verklaarde in december 2001 (drie maanden na de
aanslagen) dat hij op 11 september de live beelden zou hebben gezien van
de eerste aanslag op het WTC.
Zulke beelden zijn nooit uitgezonden op die dag. Hoe kan hij oprecht zulke
gedachten gehad hebben als hij pas beelden zag nadat hij zeker wist dat het
terreuraanslagen waren? Of wist hij op die dag al meer dan hij hoorde te
weten en is later in de war geraakt?
http://www.talk2000.nl/mediawiki/index.php/Transcript_Bush_4_december_2001

- Vice President Dick Cheney verklaarde volkomen verrast te zijn door de
aanslagen, en beduusd meegesleurd te zijn door de beveiligsmensen naar
een ondergrondse bunker. Minister Norman Mineta verklaarde echter dat hij
Cheney daar aantrof terwijl hij orders snauwde tegen een militair die de
locatie aangaf van een inkomend vliegtuig, "50 miles out". De officiële
versie is dat men de gekaapte vliegtuigen van de radar had verloren.
http://www.talk2000.nl/mediawiki/index.php/Norman_Mineta




On 3 May 2011 08:50, Antid Oto <aorta at home.nl> wrote:

> The killing of bin Laden and the “war on terror”
> 3 May 2011
>
> Washington and the corporate media have used the killing of Osama bin Laden
> to
> launch a strident celebration of US militarism. Missing from both official
> speeches and media commentary, however, is any assessment of the decade-old
> “global war on terror,” in which bin Laden’s summary execution in Pakistan
> is
> proclaimed a landmark victory.
>
> By the time of his death on Sunday, however, Osama bin Laden had become
> largely
> irrelevant, a sick old man who by all evidence lived under effective house
> arrest as a ward of Pakistan’s military intelligence. The strategic
> importance
> of his demise is generally acknowledged as nil.
>
> He was, without question, a deeply reactionary figure, whose outlook was
> steeped
> in anticommunism and religious fanaticism. It was this ideology that made
> bin
> Laden a valuable asset of the US Central Intelligence Agency in the
> catastrophic
> war that Washington instigated against the Soviet-backed government in
> Afghanistan beginning in 1979.
>
> In announcing bin Laden’s death, President Barack Obama affirmed that
> “justice
> has been done.” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton similarly declared that
> “justice has been served.”
>
> His execution by a Navy Seal team had nothing to do with justice. It had
> been
> decided in advance that he was to be killed under circumstances in which he
> could have been captured and brought before a court of law on charges
> related to
> the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
>
> Behind this decision lay a determination to prevent the long history of bin
> Laden’s relations with US government agencies from being opened up to
> public
> review. This relationship began with the CIA’s arming and funding of the
> so-called mujahideen—Islamist guerrillas fighting Soviet troops in
> Afghanistan—whom President Ronald Reagan described as “the moral equivalent
> of
> our founding fathers.”
>
> Osama, the son of a wealthy businessman in Saudi Arabia, played a key role
> in
> recruiting and training Arab volunteers for the CIA-backed mujahideen, who
> ultimately gave rise to the Taliban. Al Qaeda, Arabic for “the base,” was
> established in that period, with aid and arms from the CIA.
>
> This collaboration did not end with the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan,
> or
> with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. Bin
> Laden and
> Al Qaeda once again served as assets of the US military intelligence
> complex in
> the wars that tore apart Yugoslavia, first in Bosnia and then, at the end
> of the
> 1990s, in Kosovo.
>
> As so often happens in US foreign policy, today’s ally turns into
> tomorrow’s
> enemy. The Islamist insurgency sponsored by Washington as a means of
> undermining
> the Soviet Union ultimately became hostile to the growing US presence in
> the
> Middle East, in particular in Saudi Arabia.
>
> The history of this long and intimate relationship between an individual
> portrayed as America’s deadliest enemy and the US intelligence agencies is
> systematically covered up by the media.
>
> The events of 9/11, which to this day have yet to be seriously investigated
> and
> explained, provided the pretext for launching the “global war on terror.”
>
> What is striking about Washington’s responses to the tragic events of
> September
> 11, 2001 is that they never could be deduced logically from the events
> themselves. Fifteen of the 19 accused 9/11 hijackers—like the supposed
> mastermind Osama bin Laden—were citizens of Saudi Arabia, which has
> remained
> immune from any retribution. None of them came from either Afghanistan or
> Iraq,
> both of which would shortly be engulfed in violence and death.
>
> While bin Laden was based in Afghanistan, the relations between Al Qaeda
> and the
> Taliban government were always tenuous. In October 2001, Taliban ministers
> first
> indicated that they would be prepared to surrender bin Laden if Washington
> would
> provide evidence of his involvement in the 9/11 attacks. The request was
> rejected. The Taliban then said it was prepared to discuss turning bin
> Laden
> over to a neutral country if the US ceased its bombing of Afghanistan.
> Again,
> the Bush administration said it wasn’t interested. It wanted regime change.
>
> After invading Afghanistan on the pretense of capturing bin Laden, the Bush
> administration allowed him to escape in the battle of Tora Bora in December
> 2001, with the US military essentially ordered to stand down as the Al
> Qaeda
> leader made his way across the border into Pakistan.
>
> Bush soon indicated that he had no particular interest in capturing bin
> Laden.
> He acknowledged that the Al Qaeda leader played no particularly important
> role
> in terms of the opposition to the US occupation of Afghanistan. Indeed, he
> was
> useful alive as a symbol for the “war on terror” in general, and, in
> particular,
> for his release of threatening videotapes at politically opportune moments,
> such
> as on the eve of the 2004 election.
>
> According to the Obama administration’s account, US intelligence located
> the
> compound occupied by bin Laden in August 2010. Why it took nine months to
> mount
> a raid cannot be explained merely by technical preparations. Clearly, there
> were
> political issues involving bin Laden’s ties not only to Pakistani
> intelligence
> but to elements within the US intelligence apparatus itself.
>
> Nearly a decade after the launching of the “war on terror,” 100,000
> American
> troops are fighting a growing armed resistance movement, fueled in large
> measure
> by the killing and wounding of hundreds of thousands of Afghans in the US
> colonial war.
>
> At the same time, the so-called global war on terror took a sharp turn a
> year-and-a-half after 9/11 with the launching of the “shock and awe”
> assault on
> Iraq. Again, the aim was regime change—justified with lies about “weapons
> of
> mass destruction”—although the target, Saddam Hussein, was an avowed enemy
> of
> bin Laden and the Islamist terrorists. Over a million Iraqi lives have been
> lost
> as a result of the US war of aggression against Iraq, and 47,000 American
> soldiers continue to occupy that country.
>
> Now the Obama administration has joined in another military intervention,
> this
> one aimed at overthrowing Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi—an erstwhile ally in the
> struggle against Al Qaeda—and installing a puppet regime more subservient
> to
> Washington and the Western energy conglomerates. In this conflict, the US
> and
> its European allies are providing close air support, advisers and arms to a
> “rebel” force that includes Islamist elements who trained at bin Laden’s
> camps
> in Afghanistan.
>
> This record makes clear that Washington never saw the supposed “global war
> on
> terror” as anything more than a useful pretext—and Osama bin Laden as a
> convenient boogeyman—for marketing what the US military has come to refer
> to as
> the “long war” in Central and South Asia and the Persian Gulf.
>
> What were the real aims of this war? Zbigniew Brzezinski, the Carter
> administration national security advisor who engineered the CIA
> intervention in
> Afghanistan in the 1980s, provided clear insight into US imperialism’s
> strategic
> concerns.
>
> In his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard, Brzezinski described Eurasia as “the
> chessboard on which the struggle for global primacy continues to be
> played.” He
> stressed that with the end of Soviet power in the region, the challenge
> facing
> US imperialism was to prevent “the emergence of a dominant antagonistic
> Eurasian
> power.”
>
> Of central importance were the energy resources of the Caspian basin,
> second
> only to the Persian Gulf in their global importance. Afghanistan provided
> the
> main pipeline routes for funneling these strategic resources to the West
> and lay
> in close proximity to the three powers seen as the most likely to be
> antagonistic to US dominance of the region: China, Russia and Iran.
>
> In his book, Brzezinski lamented that America was “too democratic at home
> to be
> autocratic abroad,” with popular sentiments limiting Washington’s ability
> to use
> “military intimidation” to achieve its ends. This could be overcome only,
> he
> suggested, “in conditions of a sudden threat or challenge to the public’s
> sense
> of domestic well-being.”
>
> The attacks of 9/11 provided just such a “sudden threat” and were
> immediately
> exploited by the Bush administration to implement previously worked-out
> plans
> for US military interventions in Central Asia and the Persian Gulf.
> America’s
> ruling elite sought to counter the crisis of US capitalism through the
> military
> seizure of strategic positions in these two regions, both centers of vast
> energy
> reserves. To what extent elements within the US state and its intelligence
> agencies knew that such a “sudden threat” was imminent and allowed it to
> unfold
> remains a subject for serious investigation.
>
> The wars of aggression of the past decade have been accompanied by terrible
> crimes against democratic rights at home and abroad. The systematic use of
> assassination, torture, indefinite detention and extraordinary rendition
> against
> terror suspects has been accompanied by the erection of the scaffolding of
> a
> police state in the US itself.
>
> In their speeches, both Obama and Clinton made clear that the death of bin
> Laden
> would not stem the global eruption of American militarism. Obama insisted
> that
> “securing our country is not complete,” while Clinton vowed, “The fight
> continues, and we will never waver.”
>
> Just as the supposed hunt for bin Laden served as the pretext for the
> invasion
> of Afghanistan, so his death may be utilized to effect certain tactical
> changes
> in what has become a deepening debacle for the US military in that country.
> In
> her remarks, Clinton suggested that there could be a negotiated settlement
> with
> the Taliban.
>
> Yet, in the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia, US imperialism
> confronts
> a far more potent enemy than it could ever make Al Qaeda and bin Laden out
> to
> be. The uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain and elsewhere have been
> driven by the stirrings of a working class determined to struggle against
> the
> mass unemployment, poverty and social inequality imposed by global capital
> and
> the national ruling elites.
>
> In the US itself, a decade into the “war on terror” the crisis of US
> capitalism
> has grown far deeper, while the American working class has suffered a
> profound
> deterioration in its living standards and social conditions, even as
> politicians
> of both major parties demand massive new cutbacks.
>
> The momentary, media-manufactured euphoria over the killing of Osama bin
> Laden
> will soon be eclipsed by the inexorable growth of the class struggle and
> revolutionary confrontations between US imperialism and the working class,
> both
> at home and abroad.
>
> Bill Van Auken
>
> http://wsws.org/articles/2011/may2011/pers-m03.shtml
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>



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R.M. Kuiper
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