9/11 – Eighteen Years Later
By Habib Siddiqui
On
Wednesday the USA observed the 18th anniversary of 9/11. The attacks on the
soil of the USA was committed not by a hostile state but reportedly by non-state Muslim
zealots that were affiliated with Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda. Nearly 3000
individuals of all faiths died in the attacks.
Since
the militant group was based in Afghanistan, the mineral rich country was attacked
on October 7, 2001 as a retaliation by President George W. Bush. The Taliban regime
of Mullah Omar was soon toppled with massive bombing campaigns from the joint
Anglo-American forces. Nearly a quarter million innocent Afghan civilians who
had no connection with 9/11 were pulverized in the USA-led barbarity.
Next,
Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, which had no connection with 9/11, was invaded. President
Bush gave a new meaning to the word - savagery. Truly, never before had humanity
seen so much brutality and plundering, especially in the post-World War II era
by a government that touted itself as the model of civility and greatness. Probably,
a million Iraqi civilians were butchered by Bush and his forces. [Note: Some
reliable estimates like the Opinion Research Business (ORB) poll
conducted 12–19 August 2007 estimated 1,033,000 violent deaths due to the Iraq
War. The range given was 946,000 to 1,120,000 deaths. In the last 12 years, the
casualty figures have grown higher.] The Ba’athist regime in Iraq (like the Taliban in
Afghanistan) was promptly replaced by a puppet government.
Saddam
Hussein was hanged in Iraq. OBL was killed in May 2011 in a raid inside
Pakistan. And Mullah Omar reportedly died a natural death inside Afghanistan. Hostile
regimes were replaced by friendlier ones to the USA but the elusive peace and
security, let alone democracy, never set in. And as it appears, such goals were
not even planned or intended by the US-led invaders. Out of all the chaos which
have set in, deadlier foes than al Qaeda have emerged posing greater threat to
the security not only to the entire region but even to the West.
A
resurgent Taliban continues to challenge the authority of the elected
government in Afghanistan where the latter’s controls are mostly limited during
the daytime; a quarter of Afghanistan remains a contested territory. A small
contingent of American forces continue to provide air support and train Afghan
government forces in what has become America’s longest war.
With
its uncanny capacity to attract and recruit vulnerable youths worldwide to unleash
terrors (e.g., in places like Bangladesh
and Sri
Lanka) and temporary success inside Iraq and Syria to hold on to and fight tooth
and nail for conquered territories, Daesh (ISIS) with its highly flawed neo-Kharijite
tendencies remains a global threat anywhere despite its defeat in the Levant.
The
Arab spring blossomed and withered; the desire for a people’s participatory
democracy has been ruthlessly subdued in all but Tunisia, and perhaps Sudan
that now has a provisional government preparing the ground for democracy. Bashar
al-Assad, the Syrian butcher, has been able to solidify his power through mass killings
and destroying most of the country. With the on-going civil wars, Somalia, Libya
and Yemen have become failed states. Thousands of political dissidents have
been executed while tens of thousands continue to rot in Sisi’s notorious prisons.
Denied any medical care, Dr. Morsi, Egypt’s first and only democratically
elected president, recently died inside the court room, which has been
described by many observers including the Turkish President Erdogan as a
deliberate murder. Tens of thousands of unarmed civilians continue to die in US
drone attacks in places like Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. The non-state
terrorist outfits like the Boko Haram and the Lord’s Resistance Army continue
to terrorize civilians and government alike in sub-Sahara.
The American-led wars – or perhaps more properly the 21st
century neo-crusades – have uprooted
21 million Afghan, Iraqi, Pakistani and Syrian people who are now refugees of
war or internally displaced. Millions of them have found shelters in Turkey,
Jordan and Lebanon; a very small number of these refugees have also found asylum
in Europe, the USA and Canada.
Immigration issue has dominated the politics of many countries, emboldening
and/or electing the far right, supremacists to even catapult some of them to the
citadel of power. Sadly, exclusion and not inclusion, intolerance and not
tolerance, chauvinism and not diversity have become the new norms in many
countries with sizable minorities – legal or illegal.
Ordinary Muslims are the worst victims of this new ‘world disorder’.
They are often the targets of hate crimes and persecution under supremacist regimes who continue
to exploit 9/11 to terrorize them. As a matter of fact, 9/11 has allowed anti-Muslim
forces of all shades of color and creed to form a Kabilite
alliance
whose aim remains smearing Islam and defeating Muslims everywhere, while the
OIC remains emasculated and the Arab League remains dysfunctional.
India has morphed into an anti-Muslim, intolerant county under prime
minister Narendra Modi of the BJP who was re-elected
with a landslide victory. It did not matter
an iota to the Hindutvadi voters that as the chief minister of Gujarat he was
complicit with the murder of thousands of Muslims and that under his watch lynching
of Muslims who are falsely portrayed as ‘invaders’ or outsiders has become a
daily phenomenon. He has recently annexed the Muslim-majority state of Kashmir.
Millions of Assamese Muslims have lately been robbed of their Indian
citizenship and face an unknown future, much like the uprooted Rohingyas of
Myanmar. Under the BJP rule, history is distorted, and Muslim-sounding names of
cities, towns and villages are now Hinduized to delink Muslims to the territory
in which they and their forefathers were born.
The
indigenous Rohingyas of the Arakan (renamed Rakhine) state of Myanmar (formerly
Burma) have faced genocide
in Buddhist Myanmar. As part of a very sinister eliminationist national project,
tens of thousands of Rohingyas have been killed and raped in 2017; nearly a
million Rohingyas have been forced to take shelter inside Bangladesh where they
face an uncertain future with scant chance of ever returning to their ancestral
land with dignity and citizenship restored.
Under the pretext of curbing potential terrorist threats, millions of Uyghur
Muslims – already marginalized and deprived – are detained
in the largest concentration/internment (dubbed disingenuously as re-education)
camps in Xinjiang (formerly East Turkestan). Their academics and community leaders
are arrested, tortured and face execution
in Xi’s authoritarian regime, which is guilty of cultural
genocide and Hanification
of the PRC (let alone in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region – the historic home of
the Uyghur people) to the perils of tens of millions of Muslims there.
Thanks to the
power of the Israel-Lobby
and colossal betrayal from the Arab leaders/monarchs, the Palestinian issue – that
allegedly triggered 9/11 – no longer dominates news headlines. The latter have
all but swallowed the Zionist narrative and
abandoned their role as champions for an equitable solution to the decades-old
problem. With the illegal, incessant annexation
of the West Bank territories and Trump’s recognition
of Jerusalem as the Israeli capital, all the hopes for a two-state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli
problem are fading fast. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on September
10, 2019 that he planned to annex
the Jordan Valley, a large swathe of the occupied West Bank, if he wins a
closely contested election just a week away. As we have seen with India’s annexation
of Kashmir, which has been overlooked as an ‘internal’
affair, we may not hear much hullaballoo about this latest move either if it
were to materialize.
The biggest winner from the
9/11 tragedy has been the settler state of Israel. With her mafia-like
untouchable status rewarded and the massive failure of the world community to
punish her for war crimes in Gaza, plus Arab disunity at an all-time high, with
her foes Iraq and Syria decimated, and Iran isolated and denied rights to
nuclear power, not-so-covert ties
established with some Gulf
states, while her capital city in the occupied Jerusalem is declared kosher
by the Trump administration, and ‘game theory’ strategists’ meticulously
designed plan towards setting the stage for asymmetric power dynamic, Israel is
steadily capturing the center stage for global dominance.
Suffice
it to say that Muslims are the biggest losers from 9/11. They are divided and
weak. Worse still, ruled mostly by authoritarian leaders/rulers who fear no accountability
for their criminal actions, they are betrayed by their own kind!
At
home, the U.S. war in Afghanistan has led to the deaths of about 2,400 American
service members, including 16 in combat action this year. Some 20,000 more have
been wounded, many grievously. Data provided by the Pentagon shows that more
than 775,000 U.S. service members have been deployed to Afghanistan at least
once.
As of June 29, 2016, according to
the U.S. Department of Defense casualty website, there
were 4,424 total deaths (including both killed in action and non-hostile) and 31,952 wounded in
action (WIA) as a result of the Iraq War.
As to
the cost of the war, President Donald Trump said
that US spent $7 Trillion on Middle East Wars (i.e., the so-called global war on terror). Interest
costs would add another $8 trillion in the next four decades. Realizing that
Bush-Cheyney-Rumsfeld’s wars, which according to warmongers were supposed to be
quick, cheap, effective and beneficial to the U.S. interest, have proven
to be pyrrhic, Trump wants
America to ‘get
the hell out’ of Afghanistan.
He has
done a great favor to humanity this week by firing his hawkish National
Security Advisor, John Bolton – an architect behind the Iraqi invasion, who
remains an unapologetic and unabashed drum-beater for the War Party and the ‘Amen
Corner’ in the Capitol Hill. Bolton wanted America to go to war against
Iran to help the Zionist cause. Experts have warned that the Iraq war would be child’s play compared to a war against Iran,
who will put up a fight, far worse than all of the wars in the Middle East since
1948 combined. Much of the Middle East will be in flames. American casualties
will be many times that of the Iraq war.
These
days, political news about Trump’s tweets and debates of the Democratic
hopefuls for the presidential nomination dominate the headlines. Even the news
of the trial date for 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh
Mohammed (KSM) and his cohorts did not make any headline. It is set for January
11, 2021. Most observers like Kelley
Beaucar Vlahos don’t think it’ll happen, not in January 2021 or ever. Why? Torture
- like waterboarding, sensory/sleep-deprivation, beatings, electric
shocks and more.
According
to Vlahos, “The U.S. military and the CIA took KSM and other high-level
detainees who later spent time at the infamous GTMO off the battlefield and
into “black” interrogation sites that most Americans would rather forget ever
existed… They
tortured these individuals for information before bringing them to GTMO and
then tortured
them some more. The
reason why KSM and his four cohorts have not gone to trial yet is because
there is a dispute over whether their confessions are admissible because they
were gleaned through torture sessions in CIA prisons. By law any evidence
obtained under these conditions is inadmissible.”
Many
of the detainees at Guantanamo at its peak
were low level Taliban fighters, Al Qaeda lackeys, or worse, they were innocent
souls who were at the wrong place at the right time. Many were turned in for
money or revenge. Most of those men have long been repatriated. As of 2018, 40 detainees
remain.
With
the death of OBL, KSM remains the highest-level 9/11 suspect alive. When he was
captured in Pakistan in 2003, he was taken to different black sites for months
and subjected to the CIA extreme interrogation techniques that the Bush
Administration had approved early in the war. He was reportedly waterboarded
183 times.
Guantanamo
Bay detention center, thanks to Bush Jr. Administration, will continue to stain
America’s image as a nation that endorsed torture.
While
Trump’s America appears more divided than ever before with white supremacist
terrorism becoming the new
norms, there
is some silver lining in the post-9/11 era. Two Muslim women – first in the US
history – now serve as congresswomen. They are not afraid to speak
truth to power. They have been able to shake the establishment – the White
House and unmask many of the closet fascists and robots at the service of the
War Party.
Who
knows one day America will self-correct itself and evolve into a more inclusive
society that cares for all!
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