"We Will Never Forget"

Following the assassination of Osama bin Laden by U.S. Navy Seals inside Pakistan—an act in clear violation of international law and one that could have dire consequences for Pakistan— president Obama visited Ground Zero to commemorate the victims of the horrific crime which the now slain “enemy of mankind” is suspected to have planned.[1] While there the president solemnly declared, “We will never forget.”[2] Indeed, the victims of 9/11, like all victims of needless massacres, should not be forgotten, including the ones whose perpetrators we elected or were financed by our tax dollars.

Predictably, guardians of dominant American ideology have condemned those who dare interrupt America's “cathartic moment” by recalling the massacres that fall between the dates of September 11, 2001 and May 1, 2011. Like bin Laden's corpse, the memories of these victims, along with those that preceded the “turning point history,” get dumped in the vast ocean of history, waters only the less-fortunate are forced to swim.

When confronted with tales dredged up from history's vast ocean, president Obama has responded in typical American diplomatic fashion. In his April 2009 address to the Latin American world, he announced, “I didn't come here to debate the past – I came here to deal with the future.” He did however offer the qualification that “[t]he United States will be willing to acknowledge past errors where those errors have been made,” a statement not meant to be mistaken for an invitation.[3]

Victims of the Vietnam war naively believed they had a clear case for American error by pointing to the millions slaughtered and the innumerable victims of ecological terror, a toll which increases daily due to the enduring health impacts of spraying some 12 million gallons of agent orange and other chemical agents across the country's landscape.[4] But irrespective of any feelings of sympathy that may be evoked from the sight of deformed infants, characterizing U.S. actions in Vietnam and the surrounding region as erroneous, morally speaking, is a judgment no one is “fit to make,” as former president Clinton assured us. After all “the destruction was mutual,” according to Clinton's Democratic predecessor, who added that we ought not “apologize or castigate ourselves or . . . assume the status of culpability” for America's brutal aggression against the people of Vietnam.[5]

As evident by Carter's take on the destructive proportions of the Vietnam war, it's difficult to consult history when it's consigned to the “trash can,” as victors have a tendency to do.[6] But if we were to muddle through the trash heap, we would discover one of contemporary history's great parallels: that there are two sets of (direct) victims of 9/11, one set for which al Qaeda has taken credit and the other whose responsibility falls predominantly on the nation that has taken it upon itself (twice) to rid the world of “the evil scourge of terrorism.”

In terms of murderous and criminal quality, the first 9/11 was far worse than the second. The first case occurred twenty-eight years prior the terrible crimes of 2001, when CIA-backed forces overthrew Chile's democratically elected government and replaced it with the brutal Pinochet dictatorship, a foreign policy move that quickly led to the murder of an estimated 20,000 people and torture of 60,000 political prisoners.[7] Had an elite military force, like the U.S. Navy Seals, been given free reign to operate in total violation of domestic and international law in order to snuff out one of the top “masterminds” of this crime, U.S. citizens would have witnessed the second assassination of an elected president in just a decade. History of course did not take this path, robbing Chileans of their “cathartic moment.”

A commemoration worthy of respect would have been in remembrance of all the victims of both 9/11's, including the countless lives destroyed in the firestorm that engulfed Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and elsewhere after “the day the world changed.” In doing so, we may have discovered what future historians could very well consider a great convenience of our time, though largely unreflected in the U.S. policy response to terror. The convenience I'm referring to is that minimal standards of decency and narrowly defined self-interest align nicely in the case of responding constructively to the real threat of terror. It's not all the time that societies are largely relieved of moral dilemmas when confronting serious threats.

This conclusion is well-supported by recent history, as long as one ignores the prescriptions that have come out of the dominant intellectual class. As dissident intellectuals like Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, Edward S. Herman, and others have consistently shown, this class has with few exceptions failed in their responsibility to relate to the general public in an honest and respectable manner. The recent scholarship on the emerging threat of “homegrown terrorism” offers additional evidence for this persistent and harmful trend.

It may surprise many that in recent years a significant proportion of acts which have been characterized as “homegrown terrorism” (of a purely Islamic persuasion) have been committed by Somali-Americans. Before commenting on this, we should first bear in mind that if we were to include all domestic violent extremists, white Americans would easily outnumber any other demographic. In fact, the Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization that has been tracing the alarming rise of white hate groups since 2000, reported that in an 11-day period this January alone there were three averted cases of potential domestic terrorism by individuals from the dominant demographic, in addition to the shooting of U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona.[8] The threat of fair-skinned and non-Muslim domestic terrorism, however, has been downplayed by the mainstream press, a consequence of failing to meet a critical criterion in the terrorism discourse—inability to translate into Islamophobia.[9]

Restricting ourselves to Islamic “homegrown terrorism” (and keeping in mind that the label is highly dubious for many cases), researchers have documented the “spike in incidents” in 2009, which was largely attributable to the young Somali-Americans from Minneapolis who traveled to their homeland to fight alongside al Shabaab, one of al Qaeda's more notorious “affiliates.” A January 2010 study by Duke University scholars called “Anti-Terror Lessons of Muslim-Americans” attributes this trend to a failure of “immigrant assimilation efforts.”[10] While the scholars offer credible policy recommendations to improve such efforts, they fail to explain why none of the cases analyzed occurred prior to 2007. To do so would imply a recognition of a strange human habit: victims of extreme violence, as well as those who identify with them, on occasion resort to violent means to pursue their legitimate grievances, especially when all legal avenues for seeking justice are effectively denied to them.

Here I am referring to the U.S.-backed Ethiopian invasion of southern and central Somalia that began in December 2006. The invasion put an end to the 6-month rule of a coalition of Islamic courts and militias that committed the grave crime of liberating the region from the brutal grip of CIA-backed warlords. The consequences have been nothing short of devastating. Since the illegal invasion and Ethiopia's brutal two-year occupation, every key aspect of the overall Somalia crisis—the dire humanitarian catastrophe (now considered one of the worse in the world) and the dual threats of piracy and terrorism—has escalated dramatically.[11] It should come as no surprise then that some Somalis in the diaspora decided to travel home to confront the foreign threats.

Many western intellectuals have justified the intervention on grounds that the Islamic movement “incited a disastrous war” by provoking Ethiopia and ignoring Washington's concerns about terrorism. This thesis is advanced by piracy expert, Martin Murphy, in his most recent study of the phenomenon. In accord with standard imperial practice, he develops the thesis through demonizing Washington's enemy by drawing a loose comparison between the Islamic movement and another other official enemy, the Taliban.[12]

The comparison, however, is fitting when formulated differently than Martin and others intended. Like the Taliban, the leaders of the Islamic movement offered the U.S. an option of pursuing its concerns about terrorism without resort to military aggression. Immediately after the movement came to power in June 2006, Bush administration officials were invited to come to Somalia and investigate Ethiopian allegations that the movement was providing “safe haven” to al Qaeda-linked extremists. Similarly, Taliban leaders offered to extradite bin Laden if the Bush administration would present evidence of his guilt.[13] These facts should give new meaning to the oft-cited phrase, “Talibanization of Somalia.”

Taking up these offers and exhausting all peaceful means before resorting to state violence would have been in accord with minimal standards of decency, as well as international law. Failure to act in such accord has had devastating consequences, for others as well as ourselves. These crimes and their consequences, along with other historical events that have profound significance for the world of victims, should be in mind as we promise to “never forget,” an occasion that is no cause for celebration.

NOTES:

[1] For a brief case made for the illegality of the assassination of Bin Laden, see Marjorie Cohn, “The Targeted Assassination of Osama Bin Laden,” War Is A Crime .org, May 10, 2011, http://warisacrime.org/content/targeted-assassination-osama-bin-laden. See also Noam Chomsky, “There is Much More to Say,” ZNet, May 20, 2011, http://zcommunications.org/there-is-much-more-to-say-by-noam-chomsky.

[2] “Obama visits Ground Zero: 'We will never forget',” Associated Press, May 5, 2011, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/42910929/ns/world_news-death_of_bin_laden/t/obama-visits-ground-zero-we-will-never-forget/.

[3] Official Remarks of US President Barack Obama at the Opening of the Fifth Summit of the Americas, http://www.fifthsummitoftheamericas.org/official_statements%282%29.htm.

[4] Anthony Faiola, “In Vietnam, Old Foes Take Aim at War's Toxic Legacy,” Washington Post, November 13, 2006, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/12/AR2006111201065.html.

[5] Bandar Seri Begawan, “Clinton: No Apology To Vietnam,” CBS News, November 14, 2000, http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2000/11/15/vietnam/main249593.shtml; and “Jimmy Carter,” Wikiquote.org, http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jimmy_Carter.

[6] Noam Chomsky, “Is the World Too Big to Fail?: The Contours of Global Order,” TomDispatch, April 21, 2011, http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175382/.

[7] See Paul Street, “Remembering Chile's 9/11,” ZNet, September 10, 2003, http://www.zcommunications.org/remembering-chiles-9-11-by-paul-street.

[8] Mark Potok, “The Year in Hate & Extremism, 2010,” Intelligence Report, Issue 141, Spring 2011, http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2011/spring/the-year-in-hate-extremism-2010.

[9] Steve Rendall, “More Terror, Less Coverage,” Extra!, May 2011, http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=4283.

[10] For a copy of the study, visit the following link: http://today.duke.edu/2010/01/muslim_amer.html.

[11] See my “The Terror of Somali Piracy,” ZNet, February 24, 2011, http://www.zcommunications.org/the-terror-of-somali-piracy-by-stephen-roblin.

[12] Somalia: The New Barbary?, New York: Columbia University Press (2011), 84/8.

[13] For a detailed discussion on the criminality of the Afghanistan invasion, see Michael Mandel, “Afghanistan 2001,” in How America Gets Away With Murder, London: Pluto Press (2004), 29-56.