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Concerning September 11, 2001 and the bombing of Afgahnistan
by William Blum
Following the terrible, momentous events of September 11, 2001,
the most pressing mission facing the United States, in addition
to punishing the perpetrators who were still alive, was -- or
should have been -- to not allow what happened to pass without
deriving important lessons from it to prevent its recurrence.
Clearly, the most meaningful of these lessons was the answer to
the question: Why do terrorists hate America enough to give up
their lives in order to deal the country such mortal blows?
Of course it's not America the terrorists hate; it's
American foreign policy. It's what the United States has done to
the world in the past half century -- all the violence, the
bombings, the depleted uranium, the cluster bombs, the
assassinations, the promotion of torture, the overthrow of
governments, and more.
The terrorists -- whatever else they might be -- are also
rational human beings; which is to say that in their own minds
they have a rational justification for their actions. Most
terrorists are people deeply concerned by what they see as
social, political, or religious injustice and hypocrisy, and the
immediate grounds for their terrorism is often retaliation for an
action of the United States.
There's no need to wonder about the possible motivations of
those from the Middle East or other Muslim countries to commit
terrorist acts against the United States. Consider these actions
of American foreign policy during the last 20 years:
The shooting down of two Libyan planes in 1981; the
bombardment of Beirut in 1983 and 1984; the furnishing of
military aid and intelligence to both sides of the Iran-Iraq War
of 1980-88 so as to maximize the damage each side would inflict
upon the other; the bombing of Libya in 1986; the bombing and
sinking of an Iranian ship in 1987; the shooting down of an
Iranian passenger plane in 1988; the shooting down of two more
Libyan planes in 1989; the massive bombing of the Iraqi people in
1991; the continuing bombings and sanctions against Iraq; the
bombing of Afghanistan and Sudan in 1998, the latter destroying a
pharmaceutical plant which provided for half the impoverished
nation's medicine; the habitual support of Israel despite the
devastation and routine torture it inflicts upon the Palestinian
people; the condemnation of Palestinian resistance to this; the
abduction of "suspected terrorists" from Muslim countries, such
as Malaysia, Pakistan, Lebanon and Albania, who are then taken to
places like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, where they are tortured; the
large military and hi-tech presence in Islam's holiest land,
Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere in the Persian Gulf region; the
support of anti-democratic Middle East governments from the Shah
to the Saudis.
It's not just people in the Middle East who have good
reason for hating what the US government does. The United States
has created huge numbers of potential terrorists all over Latin
America during a half century of American actions far worse than
what it's done in the Middle East. If Latin Americans shared the
belief of many Muslims that they will go directly to paradise for
martyring themselves by killing the great enemy, by now we might
have had decades of repeated terrorist horror coming from south
of the border.
There's also the people of Asia and Africa. Ditto.
The magnitude of the September 11 attack was such that the
American media -- the serious or passably serious segment of it --
were obliged to delve into areas they normally do not visit. A
number of mainstream newspapers, magazines and radio stations, in
their quest to understand "Why?", suddenly -- or so it seemed --
discovered that the United States had been engaged in actions
such as the above and countless other interventions in foreign
lands over decades that could indeed produce a great measure of
anti-American feeling.
This was one positive outcome of the tragedy. This
"revelation", however, appeared to escape the mass of the
American people, the great majority of whom get their snatches of
foreign news from tabloid newspapers, lowest-common-denominator
radio programs, and laughably superficial TV newscasts.
Thus it was that instead of an outpouring of reflection upon
what the United States does to the world to make it so hated,
there was an outpouring of patriotism of the narrowest kind:
Congress members stood on the steps of the Capitol and sang "God
Bless America", stores quickly sold out their stocks of American
flags, which fluttered high and low from whatever one's eyes fell
upon, callers to radio shows spit out venom and bloodlust, at
entertainment and sporting events it became de rigueur to begin
with a military and/or patriotic ceremony, one could hardly
pick up a newspaper or turn on the radio or TV without some
tribute to American courage, and everyone and his cousin were
made into "heroes". This phenomenon continued, scarcely abated,
into the year 2002.
And the serious American media soon returned to normal mode;
i.e., one could regularly find more significant and revealing
information concerning US foreign policy in the London papers,
The Guardian and The Independent, than in the New York Times and
Washington Post.
Most Americans find it difficult in the extreme to accept
the proposition that terrorist acts against the United States can
be viewed as revenge for Washington's policies abroad. They
believe that the US is targeted because of its freedom, its
democracy, its modernity, its wealth, or just being part of the West. The Bush administration, like its predecessors following other terrorist acts, has pushed this as the official line ever since the attacks. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni, a conservative watchdog group founded by Lynne Cheney, wife of the vice-president, and Senator Joseph Lieberman, announced in November the formation of the Defense of Civilization Fund, declaring that "It was not only America that was attacked on September 11, but civilization. We were attacked not for our vices, but for our virtues."{1}
But government officials know better. A Department of
Defense study in 1997 concluded that: "Historical data show a
strong correlation between US involvement in international
situations and an increase in terrorist attacks against the
United States."{2}
Former president Jimmy Carter, some years after he left the
White House, was unambiguous in his concordance with such a
sentiment:
We sent Marines into Lebanon and you only have to go to Lebanon,
to Syria or to Jordan to witness first-hand the intense hatred
among many people for the United States because we bombed and
shelled and unmercifully killed totally innocent villagers --
women and children and farmers and housewives -- in those villages
around Beirut. ... As a result of that ... we became kind of a
Satan in the minds of those who are deeply resentful. That is
what precipitated the taking of our hostages and that is what has
precipitated some of the terrorist attacks -- which were totally
unjustified and criminal.{3}
The terrorists responsible for the bombing of the World
Trade Center in 1993 sent a letter to the New York Times which
stated, in part: "We declare our responsibility for the explosion
on the mentioned building. This action was done in response for
the American political, economical, and military support to
Israel the state of terrorism and to the rest of the dictator
countries in the region."{4}
The Perpetrators
For two and a half months the most powerful nation in history
rained down a daily storm of missiles upon one of the poorest and
most backward people in the world. Eventually, this question
pressed itself onto the world's stage: Who killed more innocent,
defenseless people? The terrorists in the United States on
September 11 with their flying bombs? Or the Americans in
Afghanistan with their AGM-86D cruise missiles, their AGM-130
missiles, their 15,000 pound "daisy cutter" bombs, their depleted
uranium, and their cluster bombs?
By year's end, the count of the terrorists' victims in New
York, Washington and Pennsylvania stood at about 3,000. The
total count of civilian dead in Afghanistan was essentially
ignored by American officials and just about everyone else, but a
painstaking compilation of numerous individual reports from the
domestic and international media, aid agencies, and the United
Nations, by an American professor -- hunting down the many
separate incidents of 100-plus counts of the dead, the scores of
dead, the dozens, and the smaller numbers -- arrived at
considerably more than 3,500 through early December, and still
counting.{5}
This latter figure does not include those who died later of
bomb injuries, or those who died from cold and hunger due to the
bombing's interruption of aid supplies and destruction of their
homes, which turned them into refugees. Neither does it include
the thousands of "military" deaths or the hundreds of prisoners
who were executed or otherwise slaughtered by Washington's new
"freedom fighters" in conjunction with American military and
intelligence operatives. In the final analysis, the body count
will also be missing the inevitable victims of cluster bombs-
turned landmines (amongst the first victims of the US bombing were four UN minesweepers) and those who perish slower deaths from depleted-uranium-caused sicknesses.
There will be no minutes of silence for the Afghan dead, no
memorial services attended by high American officials and
entertainment celebrities, no messages of condolence sent by
heads of state, no millions of dollars raised for the victims'
families. Yet, all in all, it was a bloodbath that more than
rivals that of September 11.
And of the thousands dead in Afghanistan, how many, can it
be said with any certainty, had played a conscious role in the
American catastrophe?
According to the video of Osama bin Laden presented to the
world by the US government, he himself didn't find out the exact
date of the terrorist act until five days before it took place,
and most of the hijackers did not know they were part of a
suicide mission until they prepared to board the planes. (The
FBI reportedly came to the latter conclusion long before the
video was made public.){6} Given that, it appears eminently safe
to say that exceedingly few other people in the world were
knowingly in on the plot, perhaps a number that can be counted on
the fingers of one hand. Consequently, if the American bombing
campaign was designed to kill the actual perpetrators, it was a
fool's mission; a violent fool.
If Timothy McVeigh, perpetrator of the terrible bombing of
the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995, had not been
quickly caught, would the United States have bombed the state of
Michigan or any of the other places he called home? No, they
would have instituted a mammoth manhunt until they found him and
punished him. But in Afghanistan, the United States proceeded
virtually on the assumption that everyone who supported the
Taliban government, native or foreigner, was 1) a "terrorist" and
2) morally, if not legally, stained with the blood of September
11 -- or perhaps one or another anti-US terrorist action of the
past -- and was thus fair game.
However, when the shoe is on another foot, even American
officials can perceive which is the honorable path to walk.
Speaking of Russia's problem with Chechnya in 1999, the US State
Department's second in command, Strobe Talbott, urged Moscow to
show "restraint and wisdom". Restraint, he said, "means taking
action against real terrorists, but not using indiscriminate
force that endangers innocents."{7}
Suggesting a moral equivalency between the United States and
terrorists (or, during the cold war, with communists) never fails
to inflame American anger. The terrorists purposely aimed to
kill civilians we are told (actually, many of the victims were
military or military employees), while any non-combatant victims
of the American bombings were completely accidental.
Whenever the United States goes into one of its periodic
bombing frenzies and its missiles take the lives of numerous
civilians, this is called "collateral damage" -- inflicted by the
Fates of War; for the real targets, we are invariably told, were
military.
But if day after day, in one country after another, the same
scenario takes place -- dropping prodigious quantities of
powerfully lethal ordnance from very high altitudes with the full
knowledge that large numbers of civilians will perish or be
maimed, even without missiles going "astray" -- what can one say
about the intentions of the American military? The best, the
most charitable, thing that can be said is that they simply don't
care. They want to bomb and destroy for certain political ends
and they don't particularly care if the civilian population
suffers grievously. "Negligent homicide" might be suitable legalterminology.
In Afghanistan, when, on successive days in October, US
gunships machine-gunned and cannoned the remote farming village
of Chowkar-Karez killing as many as 93 civilians, a Pentagon
official was moved to respond at one point: "the people there are
dead because we wanted them dead", while US Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld commented: "I cannot deal with that particular
village."{8}
Often, US bombing campaigns do have as part of their agenda the causing of suffering, hoping that it will lead the people under the falling bombs to turn against the government. This was a recurrent feature of the bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999. As can be seen in the "War Criminals" chapter of Rogue State by the author, US/NATO officials -- in their consummate arrogance -- freely admitted this again and again. And in Afghanistan we have the
example of the chief of the British Defense Staff, Adm. Sir Michael Boyce, declaring that the bombing will continue "until the people of the country themselves recognize that this is going to go on until they get the leadership changed."{8a}
Such a policy fits very well into the FBI definition of
international terrorism, which speaks of the use of force or
violence against persons or property "to intimidate or coerce a
government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in
furtherance of political or social objectives."
Speak no evil, so Americans will see no evil
In reaction to a number of gruesome images of Afghan bombing
victims, and expressed European and Middle-Eastern concern about
civilian casualties, the American media strove to downplay the
significance of such deaths. The chairman of Cable News Network
(CNN) advised the news staff that it "seems perverse to focus too
much on the casualties or hardship in Afghanistan."{9} A Fox
Network report on the war wondered why journalists should bother
covering civilian deaths at all. "The question I have," said the
host, "is civilian casualties are historically, by definition, a
part of war, really. Should they be as big news as they've
been?" His guest from National Public Radio replied: "No. Look,
war is about killing people. Civilian casualties are
unavoidable." Another guest, a columnist from the national
magazine, U.S. News & World Report, had no argument: "Civilian
casualties are not ... news. The fact is that they accompany
wars."{10}
But if in fact the September 11 attacks were an act of war,
as the world has been told repeatedly by George W. Bush and his
minions, then the casualties of the World Trade Center were
clearly civilian war casualties. Why then has the media devoted
so much time to their deaths?
These were the only kind of deaths Americans wanted to hear
about and they could become furious when told of Afghan deaths.
A memo circulated at the Panama City, Florida News Herald warned
editors: "DO NOT USE photos on Page 1A showing civilian
casualties from the U.S. war on Afghanistan. Our sister paper in
Fort Walton Beach has done so and received hundreds and hundreds
of threatening e-mails and the like."{11}
The American powers-that-be can indeed count on support for
their wars from the American people and the corporate media. It
would take an exemplary research effort to uncover a single
American daily newspaper that unequivocally opposed the US
bombing of Afghanistan.
Or a single American daily newspaper that unequivocally
opposed the US-NATO bombing of Yugoslavia two years earlier.
Or a single American daily newspaper that unequivocally
opposed the US bombing of Iraq in 1991.
Is this not remarkable? In a supposedly free society, with a
supposedly free press, and almost 1,500 daily newspapers, the
odds should be decidedly against this being the case. But that's
the way it is.
The Mecca of hypocrisy
After the terrorist attacks in the United States, Secretary of
State Colin Powell condemned "people who believe with the
destruction of buildings, with the murder of people, they can
somehow achieve a political purpose."{12}
Does that not precisely describe what the United States did
in 1999 when it bombed Yugoslavia for 78 days and nights? And is
this not the same Colin Powell who directed the horrific bombings
of Panama and Iraq? Do American leaders think that no one has
any memory? Or do they simply not care what people think?
More hypocrisy of the breathtaking kind: President Bush and
other officials have routinely and angrily declared that it's not
only terrorists that the US is going to be waging war against,
it's any nation which harbors terrorists. However, in the
chapter "Haven for terrorists", the reader will see that there
are few, if any, nations that harbor more terrorists than the
United States.
Winning Afghan hearts and minds
Bombs were not all that fell from the sky from American
airplanes. There were also food packages. Was it not something
inordinately strange for the United States to be dropping both
bombs and food on the people of Afghanistan at the same time?
If the Japanese had dropped some nice packages of teriyaki
along with the bombs at Pearl Harbor, would Americans and the
world have looked more kindly on the Japanese?
Perhaps if the September 11 terrorists had dropped some hot
pastrami sandwiches on downtown Manhattan before their hijacked
planes hit the World Trade Center ...
But these things work of course. Millions of Americans felt
a rush of pride about their country's magnanimity. The United
States, the inventor and perfecter of modern advertising and
public relations, had done it again.
And in the same vein, there were the many flyers dropped
upon the people of Afghanistan. Here's one dropped around
Oct. 20:
Do you enjoy being ruled by the Taliban? Are you proud to live a life of fear? Are you happy to see the place your family has owned for generations a terrorist training site? Do you want a regime that is turning Afghanistan into the Stone Age and giving Islam a bad name? Are you proud to live under a government that harbors terrorists? Are you proud to live in a nation ruled by extreme fundamentalists? The Taliban have robbed your country of your culture and heritage. They have destroyed your national monuments, and cultural artifacts. They rule by force, violence, and fear based on the advice of foreigners. They insist that their form of Islam is the one and only form, the true form, the divine form. They see themselves as religious experts, even though they are ignorant. They kill, commit injustice, keep you in poverty and claim it is in the name of God.
In the same spirit, the following flyer might be dropped
over the United States:
Do you enjoy being ruled by the Republican-Democratic Party? Are
you proud to live a life of fear, insecurity and panic? Are you
happy to see the place your family has owned for generations taken
away by a bank? Do you want a regime that is turning the United
States into a police state and giving Christianity a bad name?
Are you proud to live under a government that harbors hundreds of
terrorists in Miami? Are you proud to live in a nation ruled by
extreme capitalists and religious conservatives? The capitalists
have robbed your country of your equality and justice. They have
destroyed your national parks and rivers and corrupted your media,
your elections and your personal relations. They rule by threat
of unemployment, hunger, and homelessness based on the advice of a
god called the market. They insist that their form of organizing
a society and remaking the world is the one and only form, the
true form, the divine form. They see themselves as morality
experts, even though they are ignorant. They bomb, invade,
assassinate, torture, overthrow, commit injustice, keep you and
the world in poverty and claim it is in the name of God.
Rebuilding Afghanistan?
"U.S. Meeting Envisions Rebuilding Afghanistan" read the headline
in the Washington Post of November 21. After a one-day meeting
in Washington of leaders from two dozen nations and international
organizations, US and Japanese officials said they had developed
an "action program" for the long-term rebuilding of the war-
ravaged country.
This well may have throw another log on the feel-good-about-
America fire that was warming the frazzled citizenry since
September 11. But like much of that fuel, there was likely a lot
more propaganda here than substance.
It's a remarkable pattern. The United States has a long
record of bombing nations, reducing entire neighborhoods, and
much of cities, to rubble, wrecking the infrastructure, ruining
the lives of those the bombs didn't kill. And afterward doing
nothing to repair the damage.
Though promised in writing that the US would pursue its
"traditional policy" of "postwar reconstruction", no compensation
was given to Vietnam after a decade of devastation. During the
same period, Laos and Cambodia were wasted by US bombing as
unrelentlessly as was Vietnam. After the Indochina wars were
over, these nations, too, qualified to become beneficiaries of
Washington's "traditional policy" of zero reconstruction.
Then came the American bombings of Grenada and Panama in the
1980s. There went their neighborhoods. Hundreds of Panamanians
petitioned the Washington-controlled Organization of American
States as well as American courts, all the way up to the US
Supreme Court, for "just compensation" for the damage caused by
Operation Just Cause (this being the not-tongue-in-cheek name
given to the American invasion and bombing). They got just
nothing, as did the people of Grenada.
It was Iraq's turn next, in 1991: 40 days and nights of
relentless bombing; destruction of power, water and sanitation
systems and everything else that goes into the making of a modern
society. Everyone knows how much the United States has done to
help rebuild Iraq.
In 1999 we had the case of Yugoslavia: 78 days of
round-the-clock bombing, transforming an advanced industrial
state into virtually a third world country; the reconstruction
needs were awesome. Two years later, June 2001, after the Serbs
had obediently followed Washington's wishes to oust Slobodan
Milosevic and turn him over to the kangaroo court in the Hague
that the US had pushed through the Security Council, a "donor's
conference" was convened by the European Commission and the World
Bank, supposedly concerned with Yugoslavia's reconstruction. It
turned out to be a conference concerned with Yugoslavia's debts
more than anything else.
Serbian premier Zoran Djindjic, regarded as highly
pro-Western, said, in a July interview with the German
newsmagazine Der Spiegel, that he felt betrayed by the West,
declaring:
"It would have been better if the donors-conference had not
taken place and instead we had been given 50 million DM in cash.
... In August we should be getting the first installment, 300
million Euro. Suddenly we are being told that 225 million Euro
will be withheld for the repayment of old debts which in part
were accumulated during Tito's time. Two thirds of that sum are
fines and interests, accrued because Milosevic refused for ten
years to pay back these credits. We shall get the remaining 75
million Euro in November at the earliest. Such are the
principles in the West, we are being told. This means: A
seriously ill person is to be given medicine after he is dead.
Our critical months will be July, August and September."{13}
As of the end of 2001 it was 2 1/2 years since Yugoslavian
bridges fell into the Danube, the country's factories and homes
destroyed, its transportation torn apart. As of yet, Yugoslavia
has not received any funds for reconstruction from the architect
and leading perpetrator of the bombing campaign, the United
States.
Whoever winds up ruling Afghanistan will find it
conspicuously difficult to block the US military from building
what it wants to build there for its own purposes. As to the
United States doing some building for the Afghan people, they may
have a long wait. In marked contrast to the Washington Post
headline of November 21 noted above, was the report in the same
newspaper five weeks later: "The Bush administration has made
clear that because it has paid for most of the military campaign
that made the new government possible, it expects other
countries, especially Japan and European nations, to lead the way
in rebuilding the country."{14}
As if the American bombing campaign had been carried out at
the request of, or for the benefit of, Japan and Europe, and not
for Washington's own interests.
Following the their bombing of Iraq, the United States wound
up with military bases in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and neighboring
countries in the Persian Gulf region.
Following their bombing of Yugoslavia, the United States
wound up with military bases in Kosovo, Albania, Macedonia,
Hungary, Bosnia and Croatia.
Following their bombing of Afghanistan, the United States
appears on course to wind up with military bases in Afghanistan,
Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and perhaps elsewhere in the
area.
The bombing, invasion and occupation of Afghanistan were
conducted -- apart from the primitive lashing out in blind
revenge against ... somebody -- primarily for the purpose of
insuring the installation of a new government that will be
sufficiently amenable to Washington's international objectives,
including the siting of the bases and electronic communications
intercept stations and the running of oil and gas pipelines
through the country from the Caspian Sea region.
The welfare of the people of Afghanistan, by contrast, can
have counted for little, considering that the elements put into
power by US military might are largely those whose earlier rule
before the Taliban was so depraved that many Afghans welcomed the
Taliban to power; their newest atrocities, carried out under
cover of American firepower, show they haven't lost their touch.
The prime minister of the interim government, Hamid Karzai,
though himself not seeming too villainous, may have a credibility
problem, given his long close contact with the US State
Department, National Security Council, Congress, and other
pillars of the American foreign policy establishment.{15} Yet, the
connection may work only one way, for when leaders of the interim
government asked the United States to halt its bombing in
December because of the frequent mass deaths of innocents,
Washington refused, saying it had its own timeline. This does
not bode well for the future Afghan government and society;
neither does Karzai's appointment of General Rashid Dostum as
deputy defense minister, a man amongst whose charms is the habit
of punishing his soldiers by tying them to tank tracks and then
driving the tanks around his barracks' square to turn them into
mincemeat.{16}
Is this any way to end terrorism?
The American scorched-earth bombing of Afghanistan may well turn
out to be a political train wreck. Can it be doubted that
thousands throughout the Muslim world were emotionally and
spiritually recruited to the cause of the next Osama bin Laden by
the awful ruination and perceived injustice? That is to say, the next generation of terrorists. Indeed, in December, while the American bombs were still falling on Afghanistan, a man -- British citizen Richard Reid, who was a convert to Islam -- tried to blow up an American Airlines plane en route to the United States with explosives hidden in his shoes. At the London mosque that Reid had
attended, the cleric in charge warned that extremists were
enlisting other young men like Reid and that agents aligned with
radical Muslim figures had stepped up recruiting efforts since
September 11. The cleric said that he knew of "hundreds of
Richard Reids" recruited in Britain. Reid, described in the
press as a "drifter", reportedly traveled to Israel, Egypt, the
Netherlands, and Belgium before arriving in Paris and boarding
the American Airlines plane.{17} This raises the question of who
was financing him. The freezing of numerous bank accounts of
alleged terrorist groups throughout the world by the United
States may have rather limited effect.
Americans do not feel any more secure in their places of
work, in their places of leisure, or in their travels than they
did a day before their government's bombings began.
Has the power elite learned anything? Here's James Woolsey,
former Director of the CIA, speaking in December in Washington,
advocating an invasion of Iraq and unconcerned about the response
of the Arab world: The silence of the Arab public in the wake of
America's victories in Afghanistan, he said, proves that "only
fear will re-establish respect for the U.S."{18}
What, then, can the United States do to end terrorism
directed against it? The answer lies in removing the anti-
American motivations of the terrorists. To achieve this,
American foreign policy will have to undergo a metamorphosis.
If I were the president, I could stop terrorist attacks
against the United States in a few days. Permanently. I would
first apologize to all the widows and orphans, the tortured and
impoverished, and all the many millions of other victims of
American imperialism. Then I would announce, in all sincerity,
to every corner of the world, that America's global interventions
have come to an end, and inform Israel that it is no longer the
51st state of the USA but now -- oddly enough -- a foreign
country. I would then reduce the military budget by at least 90%
and use the savings to pay reparations to the victims. There
would be more than enough money. One year's military budget of
330 billion dollars is equal to more than ,000 an hour for
every hour since Jesus Christ was born.
That's what I'd do on my first three days in the White
House. On the fourth day, I'd be assassinated.
NOTES
1. The Guardian (London), December 19, 2001, article by Duncan Campbell
2. U.S. Department of Defense, Defense Science Board, The Defense Science Board 1997 Summer Study Task Force on DOD Responses to Transnational Threats, October 1997, Final Report, Vol. 1, can be found in full at http://www.acq.osd.mil/dsb/trans.pdf. The part quoted ison page 15 of the report (page 31 of the pdf online version)
3. New York Times, March 26, 1989, p.16
4. Jim Dwyer, et al., Two Seconds Under the World (New York, 1994), p.196
5. Marc W. Herold, "A Dossier on Civilian Victims of United States' Aerial Bombing of Afghanistan: A Comprehensive Accounting", http://www.media-alliance.org/mediafile/20-5/casualties12-10.html
6. David Rose, "Attackers did not know they were to die, The Observer (London) October 14, 2001
7. Washington Post, October 2, 1999
8. First quote: The Guardian (London), December 20, 2001, p.16; second quote: US Defense Department briefing, November 1, 20018a. New York Times, October 28, 2001, p.B1
9. Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 10/31/01, p.10A
10. Fox network: "Special Report with Brit Hume", November 5, 2001
11. Washington Post, November 12, 2001, p.C1
12. Miami Herald, September 12, 2001, p.23
13. The Der Spiegel interview was translated by Jost Lang and can be found in full at the Emperors Clothes website: http://emperors-clothes.com/docs/warn.htm
14. Washington Post, December 26, 2001, p.16
15. Ibid., December 22, 2001, p.16
16. The Independent (London), November 14, 2001, article by Robert Fisk
17. The Times (London), December 27, 2001, p.1; Washington Post, December 28, 2001, p.8
18. Washington Post, December 27, 2001, p.C2
Written by William Blum, author of
Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II and
Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower
Portions of the books can be read at:
http://members.aol.com/superogue/homepage.htm (with a link to Killing Hope)email: bblum6@aol.com
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