Author Archives: G.S. Griffin

GOP Attacks Clinton Over Benghazi, But Where Was it After 9/11?

Posted on by under Politics

Hillary Clinton sat before the House committee on Thursday, her face a mix of bemusement, boredom, and defiance, suffering through a seemingly eternal interrogation.

The committee has spent 18 months and over $4.5 million investigating the September 11, 2012 terrorist attack on the American State Department outpost in Benghazi, Libya, that killed a U.S. ambassador, two CIA contractors, and one other diplomat, yet another violent reaction to U.S. foreign policy.

As Clinton was Secretary of State at the time, the GOP has led a relentless assault to assign her the blame and destroy her political career, with some Democrats dragged along against their will. The committee is made up of seven Republicans and five Democrats.

Clinton took responsibility for the tragedy in January 2013.

The committee questioned why security wasn’t stronger, why the outpost wasn’t abandoned if it couldn’t be protected in a volatile area, and why the U.S. intervened in Libya in the first place.

Republican Peter Roskam called Clinton the “chief architect” of the intervention in Libya, the one who “drove it” and “persuaded people” to go along with her “plan.” As this seemed to border on questioning the legitimacy of U.S. military intervention in Africa, Roskam was quickly sushed by Democrat Adam Smith, who said such talk wasn’t relevant and that this was a hearing, not a foreign policy debate. Thus the real reason behind the attacks and the casualties–the U.S. presence in Libya itself–was neatly swept under the rug.

Further, the committee asked why the State Department covered up certain details of the event by censoring the CIA.

Indeed, the CIA reports to Congress concerning the attack were “extensively edited” by Clinton’s State Department. As ABC News reported:

The edits included requests from the State Department that references to the Al Qaeda-affiliated group Ansar al-Sharia be deleted as well references to CIA warnings about terrorist threats in Benghazi in the months preceding the attack.    

A State Department spokesperson worried in an email that being truthful about Al Qaeda affiliate involvement and warnings of possible terrorist threats “could be abused by members [of Congress] to beat up the State Department for not paying attention to warnings, so why would we want to feed that…?”

The Obama administration lied when it claimed the report to Congress was put together by the intelligence community and that the White House only changed one word, according to the ABC News report.

Apparently the CIA warnings were real enough for the State Department to wipe from the CIA report, but not real enough for Clinton to admit to; she consistently denied any intelligence warnings about a potential attack.

This is plausible deniability, a useful tool in the political handbook. Clinton can simply deny warnings existed or, barring that, that they ever reached her ears, a truly unbelievable notion.

This kind of corruption–distorting intelligence reports to protect the image of government officials–must be prosecuted and eliminated.

But one might wonder where this intense criticism of government departments and officials was in the Republican Party after the far more deadly terrorist attack eleven years to the day before Benghazi.

After all, the 9/11 terrorists were motivated by U.S. military intervention in the Middle East and Central Asia, according to Osama bin Laden and U.S. intelligence officials. Foreign military incursion breeds extremism, whether in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan, or Libya. Perhaps Roskam wasn’t seriously questioning U.S. involvement in Libya, just the way it was managed–or mismanaged–by Clinton.

Unfortunately, the painfully obvious fact that the attack never would have occurred had U.S. military and intelligence personnel not been in Libya was left unexamined, in the same way most Americans–and Congress–left unexamined how our military and intelligence presence in other nations led to an attack on U.S. soil in 2001.

In another parallel, 9/11 was not solely an intelligence failure, but a failure of officials to act on intelligence. Donald Trump, the offensive and usually misinformed Republican presidential candidate, pointed this out to Jeb Bush recently, and Republicans have gone berserk over it.

Intelligence briefers reported to President George W. Bush in August 2001 that Osama bin Laden was determined to attack the U.S. by hijacking planes (see also The Concise Untold History of the United States, Stone and Kuznick). These warnings were ignored.

Stone and Kuznick write that

Bush disdainfully told his CIA briefer, “All right. You’ve covered your ass, now.” Yet with a straight face, Bush told a news conference in April 2004, “Had I any inkling whatsoever that the people were going to fly airplanes into buildings, we would have moved heaven and earth to save the country.”

Again, plausible deniability. A fancy phrase meaning “lies.”

If citizens care about transparency, the GOP’s assault on Clinton is doing us a favor. It is simply unfortunate that 9/11 birthed blindly patriotic sheep among Republicans and Democrats alike, who rallied behind Bush and granted him the power to do virtually whatever he wished at home and abroad, through war resolutions and the Patriot Act. He was the “chief architect” of two invasions, which resulted in a catastrophic death toll of innocent civilians, and the loss of many U.S. servicemen and women.

Where was the firestorm of criticism from the GOP–or the Democrats, at least, after 9/11? Where was the 18 month investigation? When will there be harsh punishment for officials who lie, by omission or otherwise, about what they knew, and when will more politicians acknowledge the root causes of anti-American terrorism?

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How Insane Do the Police Think Black People Are?

Posted on by under Race Relations

In the wake of the horrific police shooting of Terence Crutcher in Tulsa, Oklahoma, there are few words that can be said that have not been said so many times before.

“He was unarmed.”

“He was someone’s father. He was someone’s brother. He was someone’s son. He was someone.”

“Experiments show police see blacks as more threatening and dangerous than whites — conscious and subconscious racism.”

“Arrest, convict, and imprison officers who use unnecessary lethal force — commit murder. No more commendations. No more paid leaves. Nothing will change without punishment, without justice.”

“He did not deserve to die. Even those who resist arrest have a right to life — or would in a decent society, anyway.”

“Could not rubber-coated bullets and other nonlethal options save lives? In some countries, the police do not even carry guns.”

All true statements. And of course the justifications from the police are consistent, even if at times outright lies (recall the police fabrications about Walter Scott’s murder):

“We thought he was reaching for a gun.”

“We thought he was a threat to our lives.”

The killing of Crutcher, however, raises a question that should spark critical thinking among fellow whites, a question that encourages healthy skepticism of official police reports, a question that harkens back to the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri: How insane, how blind with violent rage, do the police think black people actually are? Let me explain what I mean.

Crutcher was walking toward his vehicle with his hands raised, then reaches toward his car door. He had one officer pointing a gun at his back, another following close behind, and within seconds two more officers were on him. But from police accounts, the officers thought, in that moment, that Crutcher was stupid enough to — what? Lunge into his car, grab a gun off the seat, turn toward the officers, and mow all four of them down? Would Crutcher have thought he could survive such a thing?

But no, Crutcher was just a man with car trouble, with no weapon at his side or in his car.

What of Philando Castile in Minnesota?

Castile, sitting in a car with his girlfriend next to him and his girlfriend’s four-year-old daughter in the back seat, with an officer at the window, mere feet away, was supposedly foolish enough to decide to dig for a gun, point it at the officer, and shoot him? As if Castile would have had the time to do such a thing before being shot. How heartless that officer must have viewed Castile, too, if he suspected Castile of trying something so reckless and dangerous with loved ones in the car!

But no, Castile was a man with a conceal carry permit, pulled over because the officer thought he was a thief — because the suspect in a recent robbery nearby was also black. Castile was racially profiled, then killed because an officer thought he was insane enough to reach for a gun and go to war while in a seated position, strapped in a seatbelt, and accompanied by his family.

Likewise, Mike Brown in Ferguson was, in the white imagination, so violent and so thoughtless that after putting some distance between himself and a police officer after they had an altercation, Brown, unarmed, turns around and supposedly rushes toward the armed policeman with the intent of assaulting him! The officer then has no choice but to riddle Brown with bullets.

There are other examples, equally tragic, but the point is obvious. A healthy dose of skepticism is needed when the police offer justifications for their actions (and official accounts of events) because they make assumptions about black rationality — that is, they assume innocent people like Crutcher are going to do the most brash, irrational, suicidal, dangerous thing possible. This belief is unsurprising considering the subconscious prejudices relating to higher aggression (and lower intelligence) in blacks that nearly all white people have, which affect police conduct in many ways, including police killings. The gap between how rational people act (would even the most evil of men run unarmed toward a policeman pointing a gun at him, if he weren’t mentally unwell or suicidal?) and how the police and some whites assume black people will act in moments of tension is indicative of entirely dangerous and delusional anti-black attitudes.

Now true, the police have extremely stressful jobs and will face mentally ill people who act without reason or people wishing to commit “suicide by cop,” but believing that “the police assume everyone is going to behave irrationally and dangerously, they have to” ignores the important reality that unarmed blacks who do not attack police are killed at a rate far out of proportion to the black population, something that cannot be said of similarly acting, murdered whites compared to the white population. In other words, if police treated everyone like a madman — treated them equally — we wouldn’t see disproportionate deaths of nonviolent black people. The police do not treat blacks and whites the same.

When around black people, too many police officers are on high alert when they needn’t be. Their assumptions kill innocent people, and the public is expected to nod agreeably at their justifications, despite the blatant absurdities of the assumptions!

Too many white people drink it up.

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Would a God of Love Order a Stoning?

Posted on by under Religion

Fierce debate between the religious and the secular over the justifications for God-ordered executions in the Old Testament sometimes ignores the morality of the method of execution itself.

That is, Jews and Christians argue that in the early age of human history, it was right and just for a God of Love to order his people to murder non-virgin girls, homosexuals, nonbelievers, disobedient sons, people who worked on the Sabbath or criticized God’s laws, and so on (see Absolutely Horrific Things You Didn’t Know Were in the Bible); atheists and agnostics argue such orders make any (manmade) character an immoral monster — doubly so because later generations (after the intervention of Christ) were told to love one another as a response to such “sins,” meaning anyone born in the early days was simply terribly unlucky (see Either God Changes or He’s Psychotic: Comparing Testaments Old and New). The debate then ends in a stalemate, naturally, and no one gets around to arguing over whether a loving God would select a stoning as the best method to carry out judgement.

And select it he does. In the bible, stoning is explicitly God’s idea. Take Leviticus 24:13-14: “Then the LORD spoke to Moses, saying, ‘Bring the one who has cursed outside the camp, and let all who heard him lay their hands on his head; then let all the congregation stone him.'” Other directives to stone nonviolent people, supposedly given by God to Moses in Deuteronomy, Leviticus, and elsewhere, are numerous and easy to find.

So say for a moment that disobedient sons and the like did indeed deserve execution for their crimes, because they disobeyed God’s laws. We can give believers the benefit of the doubt for a moment and say the Judeo-Christian god exists and that ending a sinner’s life (and presumably sending him or her straight to hell) was appropriate, moral, and just. Now the question arises: how should the execution be carried out?

A loving, all-merciful deity would surely choose a method of execution less painful than stoning. He would probably order methods of instant death, or at least its attempt. Why not have the strongest man in the village smash the victim’s temple with an iron tool in an attempt to kill her immediately, in one blow? Why couldn’t the Hebrews march the sinner up to a cliff of such a height that it might guarantee death on impact? Why not hold the sinner down and suffocate him? It’s not instant, but it’s better than a stoning. And wouldn’t you rather be drowned than stoned to death? That’s also an option. Surely you’d choose a hanging, too, if given a choice. Even decapitation, with its risk of the victim living a few heartbeats after the blade comes down, seems preferable.

But no, even with less painful and quicker possibilities on the table, the deity of the bible goes with stoning — the method used by the likes of the Taliban and ISIS! It wasn’t enough that men, women, and children had to die for working on a particular day of the week. They had to suffer as well.

Such things are important to ponder. Perhaps God is not as merciful as you. Indeed, he is clearly not “all-merciful.” An all-merciful deity would be as merciful as any being (including us) could possibly be or even imagine at every given moment! Platitudes about how “God’s ways are not our ways” and “You can’t judge God using your own morals” do little to erase the facts of the case: God could have ordered less painful methods of execution, but chose not to. That says a great deal about his character. Either religious persons worship a being that is not all-merciful or perhaps, like so many other gods, he is simply a manmade fiction, and death penalty by stoning was simply primitive people behaving primitively.

We will never know how many people died by this brutal method because of the words of a deity in a scroll. But in the age of cellphones and cameras, we can get a sense of what it was like, this chosen punishment of the Almighty.

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Do Republicans Respect Police Opinion?

Posted on by under Politics

Republicans and conservatives are usually the quickest to insist the police must be respected, that “Blue Lives Matter,” and that officers should be allowed to do their jobs without pesky protests against the deaths of unarmed black males or other forms of unnecessary force. (The rightwing insinuation that one can’t respect officers for their bravery in a dangerous line of work, or want police officers to be safe, and oppose police harassment, brutality, and corruption is so obviously absurd it requires no further comment.) Conservatives are proud to have law enforcement’s back, even blindly at times. But when it comes to gun rights, it seems any deviance from mainstream conservative ideology on the part of police departments is simply ignored.

The Missouri gun bill — SB 656 — is a good example. On Wednesday, the Missouri Senate overrode Democratic Governor Jay Nixon’s veto of SB 656. In one month, Missourians will no longer need to pass a criminal background check, take a gun safety class, or get a permit to carry a concealed weapon (it is already legal in Missouri to openly carry without a permit or safety training).

The police backlash against this measure was immense.

The Missouri Police Chiefs Association is against the Missouri gun bill. Its president, Springfield Police Chief Paul Williams, said, “Someone who would have been prevented from carrying a concealed weapon before, they would be permitted to carry a weapon under this law. That creates a danger for law enforcement officers when they encounter those individuals on the street.”

Williams said the association is “at a loss for why we would want to do away with something that is working.”

The Missouri Fraternal Order of Police is against it. Its legislative director, Sergeant Kevin Ahlbrand, said:

The system we have in place works well now. Local sheriffs are the best people to recognize who in their communities should and should not carry firearms. Most of the other states with this type of legislation are mostly rural states. There’s a big difference between what happens in rural Missouri, Montana and Vermont and what happens in urban Kansas City and St. Louis.

As far as open carry in Kansas City and St. Louis, open carry is not supported by local ordinance unless people have a Concealed Carry Weapon permit. Sheriffs are the best ones to determine who should be able to carry a concealed weapon… This is a danger to public safety and it will be an increased danger to law enforcement because, quite frankly, we will have to assume everyone is armed.

The Springfield Police Officers Association is against it. President Mike Evans said:

I can tell you that a weapon in the hand of a properly trained individual can be life saving. I can also tell you that a weapon in the hand of an untrained or misguided individual can be devastating.

For those who want to take on the responsibility to carry concealed, under the pretense of being the first line of defense for themselves or possibly others, is it really too much to ask that you demonstrate you can use the weapon and have a basic understanding of the justifications for when force can be used?

The Kansas City Police Department is against it. Deputy Chief Cheryl Rose said before Wednesday’s vote, “We join law enforcement across Missouri in urging the Legislature to uphold the veto of Senate Bill 656.” Further,

Police are very concerned that if this law goes into effect, it will make it easier for many more people to perpetrate gun violence, which is a considerable problem in Kansas City. It also could make it extremely difficult for law enforcement to get guns out of the hands of people who would use them to commit violent acts.

Jackson County Sheriff Mike Sharp is against it. He said, “The public should understand that Jackson County has declined over 900 requests for a conceal and carry permit since the existing law has been in effect. We need to continue to take guns out of the hands of people who are going to be harmful to our community. If overridden, SB 656 would give those rejected 900 people the ability to own a gun.”

St. Louis Police Chief Sam Dotson is against it, going so far as to write an op-ed in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, urging Missouri to “put public safety first and let SB 656 remain where it belongs: in the graveyard of bad ideas.” He declared:

SB 656 would end Missouri’s concealed carry permit requirement, which is one of just a few remaining checks and balances we have against the arming of violent criminals. It’s already too easy for lawless people to carry lethal weapons. This bill would make it even easier, and in the process, make things that much harder for peace officers who work to keep our communities safe…

Just as a driver’s license acts as a handy proof of one’s competence to lawfully drive a car, concealed carry permits help legal gun owners readily identify themselves to the police. Removing the permit requirement would also remove that clarity, needlessly increasing the risk of confusion in encounters between armed citizens and armed officers…

Even with our current permit requirement in place, police officers routinely find themselves in harm’s way doing the job we ask them to do: to protect St. Louis from a deadly gun violence epidemic. Overriding SB 656 would be a clear step in the wrong direction. It would increase the risks officers face on the job, it would make their work even more difficult and it would, without question, leave all of us less safe.

The National Rife Association made the Missouri gun bill its “top national priority,” according to the Missouri Times, lobbying hard for Nixon’s veto to be overruled. And when the NRA says jump, Republicans ask how high, regardless of whether they’ll stomp on the police on the way down.

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A History of Violence: How the War on Terror Breeds More Terror

Posted on by under War

From a young age, Americans — like citizens of other nations — are indoctrinated with nationalism, the belief that the United States is the “good guy” in world affairs, even if sometimes making mistakes in the pursuit of its noble aims. We are taught the U.S. uses its military might to protect the freedom of Americans and foreigners, expand democracy and peace, or in simple self-defense.

While sometimes this is true, the actual history of American foreign policy is far darker and more complex. The view of our moral superiority, however, serves an important function for the State. With the glorification of one’s country inherent in nationalism and patriotism comes the belief that the lives of foreigners are less valuable than your own countrymen. So because the U.S. is in the right, it really doesn’t matter how many innocent people perish in the pursuit of its goals.

The History of Violence series takes a less nationalistic and more honest look at the reasons the U.S. uses violence and the kinds of violence it deems acceptable. The series raises a key question: Would Americans deem it permissible for other powers to do to us what we did to them, for identical purposes and using identical violence? That is, if Vietnam bombed millions of Americans to prevent us from electing a Communist government, if Mexico conquered half the U.S. for more land and resources, if Guatemala helped overthrow our democracy in the interest of its corporations, and so on.

Despite the more rosy picture of U.S. benevolence, throughout its history the American government used military force to protect its economic interests and global power at the expense of weaker (often defenseless) nations. Presidents of both political parties authorized hundreds of military interventions into foreign nations, particularly in Latin America.

The boldest tactics included invasion and occupation, aerial bombings, terror attacks and assassinations, forcing open markets, and enacting trade blockades using naval and air power. Other methods included secretly arming and training rebel and terrorist groups, organizing and supporting coups, rigging ballots, and arming and funding brutal dictators. Usual targets included popular socialistic and communistic groups or governments pushing for land reform to help peasants or seizing national resources from foreign corporations, usually American.

These actions killed millions, and led to civil war, totalitarianism, genocide, and dire poverty in many countries.

*   *   *

On September 20, 2001, President George W. Bush told perhaps the greatest lie in American history, during a speech to a joint session of Congress and a national audience. Explaining the motives of Al-Qaeda terrorists, Bush said:

Americans are asking, “Why do they hate us?”

They hate what they see right here in this chamber: a democratically elected government. Their leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms: our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other… These terrorists kill not merely to end lives, but to disrupt and end a way of life.

While it is true that ultraconservative Islamists have no interest in democracy or individual liberties, but rather religious repression and domination, the idea that the September 11 attacks were motivated by an intense hatred of “our freedoms” was absurd on its face. Would the system of government and civil rights of a nation on the other side of the globe, 7,000 miles away, really inspire men to kill themselves while massacring innocent people? If so, why not attack Switzerland on 9/11? With its direct democracy, it is more democratic than the U.S. Why not bomb Australia? Or Hong Kong, Canada, or Norway? There are many democratic countries with just as many individual freedoms as the U.S., some with more. Even America’s conservative Cato Institute knows 30 nations have greater personal freedoms than the United States. One of the most free nations on earth, Denmark, is much closer to the Middle East — why bother crossing the Atlantic?

We can put aside such thoughtless, juvenile ideas. There are more sensible explanations, provided by Osama bin Laden himself. He explained in detail why he declared war on and attacked the United States.

In short, U.S. military interventions into the Middle East enraged him and many other Arabs and Muslims — enough to plot revenge.

Our relationship with bin Laden began as a friendly one. In the 1980s, the U.S. gave weapons and money to Islamic rebel groups in Afghanistan to help push out the Soviet Union—one group, which became Al-Qaeda, was led by Osama bin Laden, a wealthy Islamic fundamentalist from Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden “developed a relationship with the Central Intelligence Agency and received American funds to help build his mountain bases” (Foner, Give Me Liberty!). 

Not only did Afghanis want their independence from a foreign occupier, some Muslims throughout the Middle East saw it as their duty to wage holy war against the atheistic Communists, to defend Islam. When the conflict was over, violent groups turned their attention to American intervention in other Arab countries, what they perceived to be a new front in the war against Islamic nations, based on U.S. atrocities in Lebanon and Somalia, the Gulf War of 1991, the sanctions that directly killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children, U.S. military bases in Saudi Arabia, U.S. support for Israel, etc. You read about these sorts of American actions in Facing U.S. Wars of Aggression.

To establish the Muslim caliphate across the Middle East that Al-Qaeda envisioned, the U.S. would have to be dealt with in the same way as the Russians. Al-Qaeda bombed the World Trade Center, a symbol of American global power, in 1993, killing six people. They did the same to the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, killing 200, mostly Africans. In 1999, they bombed the U.S.S. Cole in a port in Yemen, killing seventeen.

In 1996, bin Laden published in a London newspaper his “Declaration of War Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places,” which refers to his home country of Saudi Arabia, which has Islam’s holiest mosques in Mecca and Medina (Saudi Arabia, a brutal Islamic fundamentalist regime, is a close U.S. ally and oil partner). He saw the foreign policy of the U.S., Israel, and their allies (the “Zionist-Crusaders alliance”) in the Middle East as a war against Islam:

It should not be hidden from you that the people of Islam had suffered from aggression, iniquity and injustice imposed on them by the Zionist-Crusaders alliance and their collaborators; to the extent that the Muslims blood became the cheapest and their wealth as loot in the hands of the enemies. Their blood was spilled in Palestine and Iraq. The horrifying pictures of the massacre of Qana, in Lebanon are still fresh in our memory. Massacres in Tajakestan, Burma, Cashmere, Assam, Philippine, Fatani, Ogadin, Somalia, Erithria, Chechnia and in Bosnia-Herzegovina took place, massacres that send shivers in the body and shake the conscience…. The people of Islam awakened and realised that they are the main target for the aggression of the Zionist-Crusaders alliance.          

While bin Laden laments the “occupation” of Jerusalem by the hated Israelis, he said the “greatest of these aggressions” was the “American Crusaders” in Saudi Arabia, “the foundation of the house of Islam, the place of the revelation, the source of the message and the place of the noble Ka’ba….” He was enraged at his Saudi Arabian government for allying with the U.S.: “The King said that: ‘the issue is simple, the American and the alliance forces will leave the area in few months’. Today it is seven years since their arrival and the regime is not able to move them out of the country. The regime made no confession about its inability and carried on lying to the people claiming that the American will leave.”

Nearly all the 9/11 terrorists were Saudi Arabians.

He condemned Saudi economic ties to the U.S., mentioning the “oil industry where production is restricted or expanded and prices are fixed to suit the American economy ignoring the economy of the country.” He called for a boycott of American goods, saying: 

It is incredible that our country is the world largest buyer of arms from the USA and the area biggest commercial partners of the Americans who are assisting their Zionist brothers in occupying Palestine and in evicting and killing the Muslims there, by providing arms, men and financial supports. To deny these occupiers from the enormous revenues of their trading with our country is a very important help for our Jihad against them.

Bin Laden called on all Muslims to begin “destroying, fighting and killing the enemy.” There was no mention of American freedoms or democracy. In 2002, bin Laden offered his justifications for the 9/11 attacks in a “Letter to America”:

Why are we fighting and opposing you? …Because you attacked us and continue to attack us…you attacked us in Somalia; you supported the Russian atrocities against us in Chechnya, the Indian oppression against us in Kashmir, and the Jewish aggression against us in Lebanon…you have starved the Muslims of Iraq, where children die every day…your forces occupy our countries; you spread your military bases throughout them.

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, one of the masterminds of the World Trade Center attack, wrote something similar in 2015: the “U.S. reaped what it sowed on 9/11.” He condemned the U.S. building “military bases in the Arabian Peninsula in Tabuk, Dhahran, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, and U.A.E – which is prohibited by Sharia laws – to secure a non-stop flood of oil to [the U.S.] at the cheapest price” and U.S. support for “dictatorial rule of monarchial families and oppressive, corrupt, dynastic regimes” around the world, including “the Indonesian dictator Suharto when his army-led massacres slaughtered hundreds of thousands of landless farmers” and the “Shah of Iran and Safak, the brutal Iranian intelligence agency, for 40 years.”

He mentions the sanctions against Iraq and Madeleine Albright’s approving comment, U.S. support for Saddam Hussein “even when he was using poison mustard gas against the Kurds,” and how we “protect repeated Israeli crimes” at the U.N. “You can keep your military bases in Japan, Germany, Italy, and elsewhere, but Muslim land will never accept infidels army bases in their land.” He concludes, “If your government and public won’t tolerate 9/11, then how can you ask Muslims to tolerate your 60 years of crimes in Palestine, Lebanon, the Arabian Peninsula and the whole Muslim World?”

A study of 52 instances of terrorists targeting the U.S. found that their motives included “boiling” anger at U.S. foreign policy, such as “the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan” and our “country’s support for Israel in the Palestinian conflict.”

The War on Terror, as it increased U.S. involvement in the region, increased terrorism (by 2015, over 1 million Afghanis, Iraqis, and Pakistanis were dead due to Bush and Obama’s war, providing plenty of fuel for anti-American hatred and radicalization).

After 9/11, the CIA and international intelligence officials warned the Bush Administration that war would breed more enemies and new terror attacks. A Pentagon advisory panel, referring to the quote from George W. Bush, advised, “Muslims do not ‘hate our freedom,’ but rather they hate our policies” (Chomsky, Hopes and Prospects). 

During the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Middle East was severely destabilized and hatred of the American government spread. American military incursion served bin Laden, in that it further validated his claims about American aggression and encouraged more people to join terrorist networks; for this reason, a CIA official in charge of tracking bin Laden called the U.S. “bin Laden’s only indispensable ally” (Chomsky, Hopes and Prospects). Abu Musab Al-Suri, an Al-Qaeda strategist, believed that “the war in Iraq almost single-handedly rescued the jihadi movement.” The Charlie Hebdo, Boston, and Orlando terrorists cited U.S. invasions, drone bombings, and torture as motives for their attacks.

Al-Qaeda, originally operating primarily from Afghanistan, spread across the Middle East, Africa, Southeast Asia: into Algeria, Nigeria, Pakistan, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, India, Indonesia, etc. In 2014, the organizations the U.S. had set out to destroy in 2001 were estimated to still be strong: the Taliban had 36,000-60,000 fighters, Al-Qaeda 3,700-19,000. Acting CIA Director Mike Morell said Al-Qaeda’s “great victory has been the spread of its ideology across a large geographic area.” Al-Qaeda increased its terrorism against religious, ethnic, and political enemies in many countries. ISIS, Boko Haram in Nigeria, and the Taliban in Afghanistan spread terror as well. In 2000, there were 3,361 global terror fatalities, but over 11,100 in 2012, nearly 18,000 in 2013. This means a fivefold increase in fatalities since 9/11.

Iraq and Pakistan were thrown into chaos. Iraq went from a nation with no recorded suicide attacks in 2003 to 1,892 by 2015, killing 20,000 people. Between 1978 and 9/11, Pakistan saw a single suicide attack; between 9/11 and 2015, 486 attacks, killing over 6,000.

Nations that joined the U.S. invasion became bombing targets, like Spain in 2004 (191 killed) and Britain in 2007 (52 killed). In 2013, terrorists set off a bomb in Boston that killed three Americans. After France took a leading role in bombing ISIS, the terror group killed 129 people in Paris in November 2015. 

“This is an act of war,” French President François Hollande said, echoing Bush. “An act committed by a terrorist army, [ISIS], against France, our values, who we are, a free country that speaks to the entire planet.”

But what Louis Caprioli, former head of DST, France’s retired anti-terrorism unit, said of the attacks was more accurate: “This attack is linked to our engagement in Syria and Iraq, to our engagement in the Sahel [Africa],” as reported in a Bloomberg article titled “France Pays Price for Front-Line Role From Syria to West Africa.” Further,

This isn’t the first time France’s involvement abroad has led to terrorism at home. In 1995, Algerian Islamists set off eight bombing attacks that killed eight people and wounded 200 in Paris to punish France for supporting the government in that country’s civil war…

“For 20 years we have fought this Salafist doctrine,” Caprioli said.

France began bombing ISIS in September of 2014, launching over 200 airstrikes, mostly in Iraq. Even before this, France was supplying violent Islamic groups with weapons to fight Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. In October 2015, France bombed Raqqa and other targets in Syria. 3,000 French troops were also active in Africa to counter Islamic militants with allegiances to ISIS and Al-Qaeda.

This is in stark contrast to the French refusal to join the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, for which many Americans vilified them.

ISIS claimed responsibility for the Paris attacks, leaving no question that French military intervention was its inspiration. It called France a “crusader nation,” echoing bin Laden.

Let France and all nations following its path know that they will continue to be at the top of the target list for the Islamic State and that the scent of death will not leave their nostrils as long as they partake in the crusader campaign, as long as they dare to curse our Prophet (blessings and peace be upon him), and as long as they boast about their war against Islam in France and their strikes against Muslims in the lands of the Caliphate with their jets, which were of no avail to them in the filthy streets and alleys of Paris. Indeed, this is just the beginning. It is also a warning for any who wish to take heed.

The ISIS statement also touched on the well-established fact that Islamic extremists view Western military intervention as part of a broader religious war, calling Paris “the lead carrier of the cross in Europe” and saying the attackers were “hoping to be killed for Allah’s sake, doing so in support of His religion, His prophet…”

As with the American experience after 9/11, only a few dissenting voices in France, drowned out in the screams for more war and revenge, pushed for a deeper understanding of why the Paris attacks occurred and warned that more war will only create more terrorism.

France’s NPA (New Anticapitalist Party) was one such voice. Its statement after the Paris attacks said:

This contemptible cruelty in central Paris responds to the equally blind and even more fatal violence of the bombings by French planes in Syria following the decisions of François Hollande and his government… Imperialist cruelty and Islamist cruelty feed each other.

The NPA called for “the withdrawal of French troops from all countries where they are present, in particular in Syria, in Iraq, in Africa.”

The U.S. has a similar relationship with ISIS, like Al-Qaeda before it.

The bloody sectarian wars in Iraq caused directly by the U.S. invasion birthed new terror groups like the Islamic State in Iraq, which grew out of AQI (Al-Qaeda in Iraq) and later joined with rebel groups in Syria to become ISIS. Even during a “War on Terror,” the U.S. was not opposed to arming terror groups to meet short-term goals, only later watching former assets step out of line, as had occurred so often in the past, like with bin Laden.

A classified Pentagon report from August 2012 revealed the U.S. actively supported the Muslim Brotherhood and AQI as the extremist groups attempted to overthrow Syrian dictator Bashir al-Assad. The Pentagon predicted these groups would evolve into some sort of Islamic state, saying this could be helpful in “unifying the jihad” of the Sunnis against Assad and the other Shia power, Iran, but also noting it “will create grave danger in regards to unifying Iraq and the protection of territory.” This came true. After arming rebels and welcoming a quasi-state of Sunni Islam extremists, the U.S. watched ISIS grow too powerful, launching a campaign of conquest, rape, and ethnic and religious cleansing. ISIS tortured, mutilated, and massacred Christians, Shia Muslims, Druze, and others. When the U.S. began bombing ISIS — after the group took over Syria and northern Iraq and was approaching Iraqi oil fields—ISIS publicly promised revenge. The use of the American military has left us in an endless cycle of destruction and death.

A group of Americans who lost family in the 9/11 attacks perhaps understood this. They condemned revenge and pleaded for peace, founding an organization, 9/11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, to help eradicate Islamophobia and find nonviolent solutions to terrorism. Many wrote President Bush condemning violence, and some visited Afghanistan in 2002 to console the parents of U.S. bombing victims. A woman whose husband died at the Pentagon said:

I have heard angry rhetoric by some Americans, including many of our nation’s leaders, who advise a heavy dose of revenge and punishment. To those leaders, I would like to make clear that my family and I take no comfort in your words of rage. If you choose to respond to this incomprehensible brutality by perpetuating violence against other innocent human beings, you may not do so in the name of justice for my husband. (Zinn, A People’s History of the United States) 

There are many other groups with similar aims, such as Iraq Veterans Against the War and Veterans for Peace, which call for an end to war.

American officials will even condemn intervention, when referencing other nations. In October 2015, after Russia bombed anti-Assad forces in Syria, the U.S. declared the deaths of civilians “will only fuel more extremism and radicalization”! The Air Force deputy chief of staff for intelligence, while insisting U.S. drones were far more accurate than Russia bombers and thus didn’t kill as many innocents, said, “We believe if you inadvertently kill innocent men, women and children, then there’s a backlash from that…. We might kill three and create 10 terrorists. It really goes back to the question of are we killing more than were making?” The day after the Russian airstrikes, the U.S. bombed a hospital in Afghanistan for nearly an hour, killing 22 people, including three children.

Yemeni journalist Farea Al-Muslimi, after his village was drone-bombed, explained how such things spread the anti-American hatred that radical Islamic terrorists long for: “What radicals had previously failed to achieve in my village, one drone strike accomplished in an instant” (Chomsky, Because We Say So).

Terror attacks being revenge attacks for U.S. military incursions and wars in the Middle East should not be surprising, nor controversial. Whether you think such assaults are morally justified, despite how many innocent people die and despite oftentimes dubious motives like straightforward corporate gain, that is the cause of anti-American hatred and terrorist violence.

Nor should it be remarkable if religious zealots see their cause through a religious lens, using religion to broaden support and justify killing oneself and others. Some are convinced Western nations are trying to destroy Islam itself, though there is no evidence this has ever been among America’s dubious motives. The fact that Islamic fundamentalist extremists earnestly believe their deity wants them to kill Americans — waging a war to protect “Muslim lands” and Islam from foreigners and get revenge for prior U.S. interventions and alliances — simply does not change the actual historical cause of the conflict. After all, in the late 1980s and early 1990s there were no Muslim military bases in the United States and neighboring nations; Muslims did not drop bombs on Denver and Charleston; Muslim armies did not land troops on the east coast; Muslim governments did not help Muslim corporations seize large portions of American natural resources like oil. But the U.S. did all these things in Muslim nations of the Middle East, for half a century (for example, U.S. oil companies were operating in the Middle East by the 1940s, protected by the British, who occupied much of the region after World War I).

This examination is not to justify bloody terror attacks, in the same way most of the bloody U.S. interventions discussed in Part I: Facing U.S. Wars of Aggression cannot be justified by ethical people free from the blinders of patriotic indoctrination. But it does help us understand why 9/11 and other attacks occurred, and how a “War on Terror” cannot be won, how it is a cycle of U.S. invasions (drone bombings, too) and extremist revenge attacks, each feeding the other — it is endless war. The only way to stop the war is to withdraw — and never repeat our foreign policy mistakes.

These things make us consider how we might react if America was a weaker, poorer nation and subject to the kinds of blows we dealt to Middle East nations for decades. Some would surely take up our arms and plot revenge in the home nations of enemies, and like Muslims convinced deadly U.S. policies are part of an attack on Islam itself, some Americans would surely come to see Muslim invasions of Iowa and Illinois as motivated by something equally inaccurate and nonsensical — freedom, perhaps.

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