CounterPunch
Special Report:
9/11 One Year After
September
7, 2002
The Tenth Crusade
by Alexander Cockburn
Amid the elegies for the dead and the ceremonies
of remembrance, seditious questions intrude: Is there really
a war on terror; and if one is indeed being waged, what are its
objectives?
The Taliban are out of power. Papaver
somniferum, the opium poppy, blooms once more in Afghan pastures.
The military budget is up. The bluster war on Iraq blares from
every headline. On the home front the war on the Bill of Rights
is set at full throttle, though getting less popular with each
day as judges thunder their indignation at the unconstitutional
diktats of Attorney General John Ashcroft, a man low in public
esteem.
On this latter point we can turn to Merle
Haggard, the bard of blue collar America, the man who saluted
the American flag more than a generation ago in songs such as
the Fighting Side of Me and Okie from Muskogee. Haggard addressed
a concert crowd in Kansas City a few days ago in the following
terms: "I think we should give John Ashcroft a big hand
...(pause)... right in the mouth!" Haggard went on to say,
'the way things are going I'll probably be thrown in jail tomorrow
for saying that, so I hope ya'll will bail me out."
It will take generations to roll back
the constitutional damage done in the wake of the attacks. Emergency
laws lie around for decades like rattlesnakes in summer grass.
As Joanne Mariner of Human Rights Watch  points out to me, one of the
main legal precedents that the government is using to justify
detaining "enemy combatants" without trial or access
to a lawyer is an old striking-breaking decision. The government's
August 27 legal brief in the Padilla "enemy combatant"
case relies heavily on Moyer v. Peabody, a Supreme Court case
that dates back to 1909.
The case involved Charles Moyer, president
of the Western Federation of Miners, a feisty Colorado trade
union that fought for such radical reforms as safe working conditions,
an end to child labor, and payment in money rather than in company
scrip. As part of a concerted effort to crush the union, the
governor of Colorado had declared a state of insurrection, called
out the state militia, and detained Moyer for two and half months
without probable cause or due process of law.
In an opinion that deferred obsequiously
to executive power (using the "captain of the ship"
metaphor,), the US Supreme Court upheld Moyer's detention. It
reasoned that since the militia could even have fired upon the
strikers (or, in the Court's words, the "mob in insurrection"),
how could Moyer complain of a mere detention. The government
now cites the case in its Padilla brief to argue that whatever
a state governor can do, the president can do better. As Mariner
remarks, next thing you know they'll be citing the Japanese internment
precedents.
Right under our eyes, as former top CIA
analyst Bill Christison describes today on this site, a whole
new covert ops arm of government is being coaxed into being by
the appalling Rumsfeld, who has supplanted Powell as Secretary
of State, issuing public statements contradicting offical US
policy on settlements and Israel's occupation of the West Bank
and Gaza. Rumsfeld has asked Congress to authorize an new undersecretary
of defense overseeing all DoD intelligence matters, also requesting
that the DoD be given greater latitude to carry out covert ops.
Wrap that in with erosion or outright dumping of the Posse Comitatus
act of 1878 forbidding any US military role in domestic law enforcement
and the silhouette of military government shows up ever more
clearly in the crystal ball.
The terrorists in those planes a year ago nourished specific
grievances, all available for study in the speeches and messages
of Osama bin Laden. They wanted US troops out of Saudi Arabia.
They saw the US as Israel's prime backer and financier in the
oppression of Palestinians. They railed against the sanctions
grinding down upon the civilian population of Iraq.
A year later the troops are still in
Saudi Arabia, US backing for Sharon is more ecstatic than ever
and scenarios for a blitzkrieg against Saddam Hussein mostly
start with a saturation bombing campaign which will plunge civilians
in Iraq back into the worst miseries of the early 1990s.
Terror against states springs from the
mulch of political frustration. We live in a world where about
half the population of the planet, 2.8 billion people, live on
less than two dollars a day. The richest 25 million people in
the United States receive more income than the 2 billion poorest
people on the planet. Across the past year world economic conditions
have mostly got worse, nowhere with more explosive potential
than in Latin America, where Peru, Argentina and Venezuela all
heave in crisis.
Is the world impressed with America's
commander-in-chief? The answer is mostly, No. But wars need leaders,
and for George Bush it's been a wobbly slide downhill from the
terse defiance of that first emergency joint session of Congress,
to the strange on-again, off-again proclamations about an attack
on Iraq.
Can anything stop these proclamations
from being self-fulfilling? Another slump on Wall Street would
certainly postpone it, just as a hike on energy prices here if
war does commence will give the economy a kidney blow when it
least needs it.
How could an attack on Iraq be construed
as a blow against terror? The administration abandoned early
on, probably to its subsequent regret, the claim that Iraq was
complicit on the attacks of September 11. Aside from the Taliban's
Afghanistan the prime nation that could be blamed was Saudi Arabia,
point of origin for so many of the Al Qaeda terrorists on the
planes.
Would an attack on Iraq be a reprisal?
If it degraded Saudi Arabia's role as prime swing producer of
oil, if it indicated utter contempt for Arab opinion, then Yes.
But does anyone doubt that if the Bush administration does indeed
topple Saddam Hussein and occupy Baghdad, this will be truly
a plunge into the unknown, one that would fan once more the embers
of Islamic radicalism that peaked as long ago as the end of the
1980s, and amid whose decline the attacks of September 11, 2001
were far more a coda than an overture.
Would Iran sit quiet while US troops
roosted in Baghdad. And would not the overthrow of Saddam be
prelude to the downfall of the monarchy in Jordan, with collapse
of the House of Saud following thereafter?
Islamic fanatics flew those planes a
year ago and here we are with a terrifying alliance of Judaeo-Christian
fanatics, conjoined in their dreams of the recovery of the Holy
Lands of the West Bank, Judaea and Samaria. War on Terror? It's
back to the late thirteenth century, picking up where Prince
Edward left off with his ninth crusade after St Louis had died
in Tunis with the word Jerusalem on his lips.
Alexander Cockburn can be reached at: counterpunch@counterpunch.org
CounterPunch Special Report:
9/11 One Year After
Bill Christison
A
Year Later: It's Happening Here
Alexander Cockburn
The
Tenth Crusade
Susan Davis
Mr. Ashcroft's
Neighborhood
Bruce Jackson
When
War Came Home
David Krieger
Looking
Back on September 11
Peter Linebaugh
Levellers and 9/11
Jeffrey St. Clair
The Trouble
with Normal
Tom Stephens
Rise Up...Dump Bush
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September
6, 2002
Jeffrey St.
Clair
Stolen
Trust
Gale Norton, Indians and the Case of the Missing $10 Billion
September
5, 2002
Ben Tripp
Jesus vs.
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William Hughes
McKinney's
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Gavin Keeney
Beaux
Reves, Citoyens!
Wayne Saunders
War
Begins; Nobody Notices
Irit Katriel
Drunk
with Power:
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Robert Fisk
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Uri Avnery
The Return
of the Dinosaurs
September
2, 2002
Francis Boyle
Flashback:
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Lou Cohan
Confessions
of a Downloader
Philip Farruggio
Labor
Day Antidote to Apathy
William Blum
Cuban Political
Prisoners
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September
1, 2002
Dave Marsh
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Springsteen's The Rising
August 31,
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Return to the
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David Vest
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Neve Gordon
Sharon's
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Dr. Susan
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The Gangbang
Asthete
The Sexual Life
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Kurt Nimmo
Clueless
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August 30,
2002
Alexander
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American
Journal:
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August 29,
2002
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The Secret
Sharers:
The CIA and the Murder of Frank Olson
Resources:
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About 9/11
CounterPunch:
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Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By
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and Jeffrey St. Clair
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Read
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