|| From: Max Sawicky
||
|| HA: OK now I see. Well I would counter your "it can't happen because it
|| would
|| delegitimize" with "it always happens but it doesn't delegitimize". Why?
|| Because the Gulf of Tonkin, the provocations leading to the
|| Soviet invasion
|| of Afghanistan, the trap set for Iraq, these were all executed
|| by a small
|| group, although the policy goals were based on a wide
|| consensus. Therefore
||
|| mbs: sure, but ex ante, none of these acts required cover-up because
|| none of them were blatant violations of U.S. law. GoT and Iraq were
|| pedestrian exercises in official high-level b.s. Afghan provocations
|| were similarly mundane, in and of themselves. Only in retrospect in
|| light of implications do they loom large. Even so, none of them hold
|| a candle to a terrorist act that claims thousands of lives.
||
|| HA: the secret did not get out and what leaks occurred were not
|| sufficient
|| to
|| discredit a US government legitimized by the symbols of freedom and
|| democracy. Precisely the same thing is happening now, there are leaks of
|| CIA-ObL collusion, of the US threatening war before S11, etc.
|| None of this
|| can penetrate the patriotic frenzy whipped up by the terror attack. The
||
|| mbs: this is all inside baseball from the public's standpoint. People
|| don't give a shit. There is no comparison between this and hatching
|| a terrorist attack on one's own nation. That is the sort of thing that
|| cannot easily be done in secret, so basing historical analysis on a
|| supposition that it can is not good practice. Of genuine interest is
|| the confluence of forces and history that hatches something as
|| perversely interesting as al-qaida, the Taliban, and related
|| intrigue.
||
I agree with your last point, but I wouldn't call it "confluence of forces" so much as a multibillion-dollar covert operation. It's no secret that the Saudis have been at this Wahhabite terrorism game since the kingdom saw the day. In fact, that's how they got their kingdom. I've lived with Saudi-financed terrorism here as far as I can remember; many intellectuals I knew personally were killed by Wahhabite backed terrorists. It's also no secret that first Great Britain and later the US supported Saudi in this. Germany was also a strong backer of the Saudi-aligned Welfare Party in Turkey and until S11 refused to ban Turkish Wahhabite extremist organizations. "Confluence of forces" would suggest a protest or resistance movement. There are certainly enough things wrong with the Middle East for such movements to take form, but the presence of police states guarantees that indigenous movements will be snuffed out promptly. So seemingly popular movements like the Muslim Brotherhood are in reality proxies. There are no "forces" as such, but government policies using widespread popular discontent as a recruiting ground for terrorists.
Now as for your points about the unlikelihood of a self-inflicted terrorist attack and the point you make later on about the futility of discussing Lockerbie, I would suggest that the well-documented case for CIA collusion with FPLP-GC in the Lockerbie bombing that I've outlined in the post below demonstrate that S11 could very well have occurred with the CIA's prior knowledge. If you can get away with letting 270 people die, you may well set your sights higher. Admittedly, the case for CIA collusion in S11 is nowhere near as strong as Lockerbie, but the "intelligence failure" story is less and less credible.
The Lockerbie post: Subject: RE: Chip's self-advertising travesty of history RE: Hakki, Paranoia, and Fascist Garbage Date: Fri, 16 Nov 2001 12:23:40 +0200
(...)
|| mbs: Killing ObL doesn't help the left a bit, but taking an
|| agnostic stance
|| towards killing ObL hurts the left a lot. Ironically, I would
|| say that this
|| whole affair has done more to illuminate the Wahhabite/U.S. complex
|| more than anything else could have (another reason to doubt U.S.
|| complicity in 9/11, BTW). In this context, the conspiratorial layer --
|| all the intimations of foreknowledge, Elder Bush eating spaghetti
|| in Italy on certain days with certain people -- is an obstruction to
|| clarity.
I'm not saying the US public will ever want to hear about this - judging from the level of denial on this list, it's a pretty sure bet it won't - but the casual use of terrorism - including domestic terrorism - to manipulate public opinion (a sort of rehashed Northwood) is something no political analyst should ignore.
||
|| I think there are some great openings for the left in all this now,
|| including along the following lines:
||
|| 1. GWB sez we fight for freedom, but our allies (and not just
|| the recent, opportunistic ones) are little different in this respect
|| from the Taliban. Note that lumping the U.S. together with all
|| of this -- discounting the extent of democratic freedom here --
|| vitiates this point; same idea, re: laura Bush's women and children
|| routine.
||
|| 2. everyone understands that economic deprivation at least
|| contributes to terrorism, though it is not necessarily a key
|| cause of it, so let's get serious, why don't we, about aid
|| to under-developed countries;
||
|| 3. nuclear proliferation. Amy Carter was right. Aid to
|| Russia, especially re: nuke-savvy scientists.
||
|| 4. Palestine; two state solution. undercut the jihadist maniacs.
||
|| 5. Let's look at current U.S. collaboration with future ObL's in
|| South America, Asia, Africa.
What I sense from this is that you don't see any chance that the US public will ever draw a self-critical lesson from S11, so the only useful course of action would be a limited questioning of US global policies. I wonder if it's the left's role to act as a consultant for US imperialism. Is that all that the left can manage? A project for an enlightened empire?
Hakki