But again we digress. Despite continuing evidence of Pakistani support for terrorists and armed militants from within the ISI and Pakistani military, the U.S. continued to back Musharraf, a dictator who seized power in a coup in 1999. The government in Washington continued to support him even as he held a fraud election last year, declared martial law, suspended the constitution, replaced judges — including on Pakistan’s Supreme Court — with his own lackeys, and cracked down on his political opposition — all in the name of fighting terrorism, a cynical euphemism he could only get away with under the backing of those in Washington only too well familiar with employing the same rhetorical device to push through their own ideologically driven policies and agendas.
There is no shortage in history of governments violating human rights and freedoms in the name of security. That trend continues today, and the United States is no exception.
Returning to the point, the fact is that those who argue that the U.S. is fighting a “war on terrorism” don’t have a leg to stand on. The very notion is an absurdity. The world’s leading culprit of state-sponsored terrorism — the only country ever to have been found guilty of what amounts to international terrorism, the “unlawful use of force”, for its proxy terrorist war against the elected government of Nicaragua (giving the U.S. the benefit of the doubt that its actions didn’t amount to the even greater crime of aggression) by the World Court — cannot possibly fight a “war on terrorism”.
This would be like Panama declaring under Manuel Noriega (a long-time CIA asset) that it was waging a “war on drugs.”
It’s an absurdity to even suggest that the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world today”, as Martin Luther King, Jr. put it during the war against Vietnam (words that ring even more true today), could be fighting a “war on terrorism”, particularly by such means as invading and bombing other countries. Bringing death, sorrow, and even further hardship to peoples of other regions does not help bring about an end of the scourge of terrorism that plagues the Earth. It only contributes to that scourge.
So let’s return to the Times’ assumption that there is a “campaign against terrorism” going on. This is a myth. On the opinion of Mr. Ahmed Issab that 9/11 was actually the result of a plot by the U.S. government to serve as a pretext for expanding its global hegemony overseas, the author of the piece states, “It is easy for Americans to dismiss such thinking as bizarre.”
Perhaps the Times reporter has spent too much time overseas. One needn’t travel to Riyadh or Cairo to find people who believe just that. There’s no shortage of Americans who share in that belief.
Such Americans point to the fact that the so-called neo-conservatives setting policy in the Bush administration are the same bunch of folks who had for so long argued that the U.S. needed a “transformation” of its military into a force capable of fighting multiple simultaneous wars to be able to further the goal of global hegemony, particularly over the energy-rich Middle East and Central Asian regions.
They point out that plans to overthrow the Taliban existed prior to the 9/11 attacks, and that Iraq — its people long the victim of the U.S. policy of “regime change” — was in the government’s sights immediately after the attacks, despite there not being any evidence of Iraqi involvement whatsoever.
They also point out that there was a consensus among policy-makers that this “transformation” and the expansion of U.S. global dominance could not happen without some sort of catalyst — “like a new Pearl Harbor”, to use their own words. And these same planners were among those to compare the 9/11 attacks to the attack on Pearl Harbor after the fact. 9/11, some even said openly, was an “opportunity” to further their goals for the U.S. in its foreign policy.
But the Times, while suggesting the idea is without foundation, says we shouldn’t dismiss such thinking as that expressed by Mr. Issab. The reason given is instructive; to do so would be to fail to learn the lesson that the U.S. has failed “in the fight against terrorism” to actually “convince people” in the Middle East “that the United States is, indeed, waging a campaign against terrorism”.
In other words, the U.S. is losing the propaganda war.
The Times notes that many Arabs are convinced that the U.S. and Israel were actually behind the 9/11 attacks. “The rumors that spread shortly after 9/11 have been passed on so often that people no longer know where or when they first heard them. At this point, they have heard them so often, even on television, that they think they must be true.”
It is indeed a disturbing trend, for whole groups of people to believe something is true just because it is repeated on television again and again. Take, for another example, the widely held belief among Americans that Iraq was a threat to the U.S. and had weapons of mass destruction. One poll taken by the Washington Post showed that as many 70% of Americans actually believed that Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 attacks.
But let’s get back to the rumors the Times tells us Arabs have come to regard as fact.
“First among these,” the article continues, “is that Jews did not go to work at the World Trade Center on that day. Asked how Jews might have been notified to stay home, or how they kept it a secret from co-workers, people here wave off the questions because they clash with their bedrock conviction that Jews are behind many of their troubles and that Western Jews will go to any length to protect Israel.”
Of course, it is true that it is an urban legend that no Jews went to work at the WTC on September 11. But that myth seems to have sprung from the fact that there were indeed reports that Jews working in the building were warned of the coming attack. One is tempted to dismiss this with the assumption that it is propaganda from Arab media sources. In fact, it was an Israeli paper, Haaretz, that reported that workers at Odigo, an Israeli owned messaging service company with an office four blocks from the WTC, had received warnings that very day of an impending attack.
The Washington Post followed up on the report, saying that officials at Odigo “confirmed today that two employees received text messages warning of an attack on the World Trade Center two hours before terrorists crashed planes into the New York landmarks.” Despite the fact that Odigo said it had the IP address of the sender and was working with the FBI to track down whoever was responsible, to the best of my knowledge it was never reported that they either succeeded or failed in doing so.
Incidentally, Odigo was partnered with another Israeli company called Comverse.
Fox News reported in a series of reports on the uncovering of a massive Israeli spy ring operating in the U.S., saying that “There is no indication that the Israelis were involved in the 9-11 attacks, but investigators suspect that they may have gathered intelligence about the attacks in advance and not shared it.” One investigator told Fox News, “Evidence linking these Israelis to 9-11 is classified, I cannot tell you about evidence that has been gathered.”
As many as 60 Israelis were detained on suspicion of their participation in the spy ring. Part of their operation involved supposed “art students” trying to get into the homes of government personnel, including members of the military, the DEA, FBI, and other law enforcement and intelligence personnel, under the guise of selling art.
Fox News also revealed that “virtually all call records and billing in the U.S. are done for the phone companies by Amdocs Ltd., an Israeli-based private communications company.” According to Fox News, the National Security Agency (NSA) has warned U.S. intelligence and law-enforcement numerous times about the potential security breaches that this situation could make possible.
Reporter Carl Cameron also noted that Israel’s intelligence agency, Mossad, had warned the U.S. of a possible attack prior to 9/11, but that the warning “was nonspecific and general, and [investigators] believe that it may have had something to do with the desire to protect what are called sources and methods in the intelligence community; the suspicion being, perhaps those sources and methods were taking place right here in the United States.”
The third report in the series reported on another Israeli company that “provides wiretapping equipment for law enforcement.” The company? Comverse Infosys. But there were fears about the system Comverse provided because “wiretap computer programs made by Comverse have, in effect, a back door through which wiretaps themselves can be intercepted by unauthorized parties. Adding to the suspicions is the fact that in Israel, Comverse works closely with the Israeli government, and under special programs, gets reimbursed for up to 50 percent of its research and development costs by the Israeli Ministry of Industry and Trade.”
“But,” Cameron added, “investigators with the DEA, INS and FBI have all told Fox News that to pursue or even suggest Israeli spying through Comverse is considered career suicide.”
A fourth installment in the series noted that the number of Israeli citizens that had been detained as suspected members of a foreign intelligence operation was nearly 200, and that most of them had been deported. Most “had served in the Israeli military, which is compulsory there. But they also had, most of them, intelligence expertise, and either worked for Amdocs or other companies in Israel that specialize in wiretapping.”
The Jewish newspaper Forward reported that, “In recent years two reports, one by the Government Accounting Office, the other by the Defense Intelligence Agency, warned against Israeli economic and military espionage activity in the United States. In addition, the FBI conducted an investigation during the late 1990s into alleged Israeli wiretapping of the White House, the State Department and the National Security Council. The investigation ended in May 2000 without any result, according to The New York Times.”
Then there were the reports of the five dancing Israelis who were arrested after behaving suspiciously upon witnessing the burning towers from New Jersey. The five were witnessed by their white van videotaping or taking photos of the smoking buildings and celebrating. The FBI put out an alert on the vehicle after a witness reported its license plate number, which was registered to a company called Urban Moving Systems, an Israeli owned company.
When they were found, the driver told the arresting officers, “We are Israeli. We are not your problem. Your problems are our problems. The Palestinians are the problem.” The suspects’ names came up in a search of the national intelligence database and they were suspected of conducting an intelligence operation. Forward noted that Urban Moving was a “company with few discernable assets that close up shop immediately afterward and whose owner fled to Israel.”
Forward also noted the Israeli “art students” who had been detained on suspicion of espionage, and added that “a counterintelligence investigation by the FBI concluded that at least two” of the Israelis seen celebrating the attacks on the World Trade Center “were in fact Mossad operatives”.
Reports such as these naturally fueled any number of conspiracy theories surrounding the events of 9/11. But the fact remains that despite two so-called “investigations” into 9/11, first the Joint Inquiry and then the 9/11 Commission, countless questions remain yet unanswered about just about every facet of the attacks.
Many of the alleged hijackers, to name just one further notable example, have been reported by reputable news agencies, such as the BBC, as being alive and well.
The New York Times article continues: “Americans might better understand the region, experts here said, if they simply listen to what people are saying — and try to understand why — rather than taking offense. The broad view here is that even before Sept. 11, the United States was not a fair broker in the Arab-Israeli conflict, and that it capitalized on the attacks to buttress Israel and undermine the Muslim Arab world.
“The single greatest proof, in most people’s eyes, was the invasion of Iraq. Trying to convince people here that it was not a quest for oil or a war on Muslims is like convincing many Americans that it was, and that the 9/11 attacks were the first step.”
“There are Arabs who hate America, a lot of them, but this is too much,” Hisham Abbas, a student at Cairo University told the Times. “And look at what happened after this – the Americans invaded two Muslim countries. They used 9/11 as an excuse and went to Iraq.”
Of course, under the prevailing assumption that defines the framework for the article, such ideas, though perhaps “conventional wisdom” in the Middle East, should be considered merely “rumors”.
The conventional wisdom, on the other hand, that the U.S. is fighting a “campaign against terrorism”, is accepted by the Times without question — it is simply an article of faith. Yet the conventional wisdom shared by the Times that there is no truth to the “rumors” that many people in the Middle East believe is belied by the facts. In many cases, there are elements of truth behind the myths that deserve our attention and demand answers to the reasonable questions they precipitate.
Americans would do well to take the above advice, given by experts in the Middle East and relayed to us through the New York Times, into consideration; to try to listen to what people in the Middle East are saying, and to understand.
If we ever truly wish to engage in a campaign against terrorism, that would be an elementary first step and a worthy alternative to spreading even more violence.