The newspaper "The Washington Post" (published of
Washington Post
)
article
at length I reviewed a
number of books published in the
United States over the
past two decades on the
repercussions of
September / September 11 ,
2001 attacks and the
outcome of
the Washington 's
efforts in the
fight against "terrorism" of failure.
Rather than embodying the "supreme American values", the official response to these attacks was characterized by the worst traits of deceit, arrogance, arrogance, ignorance, misinformation, transgression, and belittling, as US critic Carlos Lozada described the article.
This conclusion was reached by the authors of books and memoirs that spread widely during the two decades of the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington.
Lozada, who won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, says that reading or re-reading those books and memoirs today is like watching an old movie that makes you feel more sad and frustrated than you remember from those events.
A disavowal of American values
Many of these books tell stories of repudiation of American values, not by "radical outsiders, but our own repudiation of them";
Betraying these "recognized" principles is like friendly fire on the war on "terrorism".
These actions foretell that indifference to the growing scourge of "terrorism" has led to a thirst for blood and a desire for revenge after those attacks.
Blurring facts and intentions is a justification for wars and thus prolonging them, because in the name of combating “terrorism” security is politicized, brutality is legitimized, and patriotism is turned into a weapon, as the writer claims.
It is true that these features were an emergency, and this is understandable in the view of Carlos Lozada, but that exceptional case - as the article describes it - has become the "new American exceptionalism."
It happened quickly;
When, in 2004, the National Commission to Investigate Terrorist Attacks on the United States - also known as the 9/11 Commission - issued its final report calling on US authorities to "regularly engage in the struggle of ideas", it came too late, as the Department of Justice was It has already signed preliminary memoranda on torture, and photos taken from inside Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison have undermined US claims to its moral authority.
Senior Bush aides pushed him toward fueling the war in Iraq (Al-Jazeera)
The war has moved to America itself
These recent intellectual works reviewing the effects of the September 11 attacks reveal how the methods of the war on “terrorism” turned against religious groups, immigrants and demonstrators in the United States, and the war in America itself moved around as if it owned the place, as Carlos Lozada put it.
In his book "Ghost Wars", American journalist Steve Cole says - speaking in 2004 about the CIA's involvement in Afghanistan before the September 11 attacks - "It is easy for the researcher at the present time to explain how and why They (those attacks) happened, and that's better for him than explaining the repercussions."
Throughout the period that followed those attacks, Washington had the illusion of its ability to reshape the world according to its perception, "but it resulted in the world having an ugly face for itself."
The writings on September 11 dealt with the intentions of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden from those attacks, and his changing visions for what followed. He imagined that America would weaken and panic, and its position in the world would decline - especially in the Middle East - as soon as death began to affect its soldiers.
Luring Washington to exhaustion
In this, Cole says that bin Laden has begun to realize the feasibility of luring Washington to the point of exhaustion by making it "bleed to the point of bankruptcy" through endless military expansion, as a consequence of resisting its international influence and undermining its internal unity.
When (former) President George W. Bush addressed the American nation from the Oval Office of the White House on the evening of September 11, 2001, he asserted that America was attacked because it was "the most beautiful beacon of freedom and opportunity in the world, and no one would be able to prevent that light from shining."
"The most terrifying aspect of this new threat was that almost no one took it seriously; it was so strange, so primitive and amazing."
This was the impressions of American officials about bin Laden and his "terrorist network", as was portrayed by American journalist Lawrence Wright in his book entitled "The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11".
Sayed Qutb
Wright elaborated on the influence of the "Egyptian thinker" Sayyid Qutb, "whose temporary stay in the United States revived his vision of the clash between Islam and modernity, and whose writings will inspire future jihadists."
In "Ghost Wars," writer Steve Cole deplores America's abandonment of Afghanistan after it was no longer an arena for proxy war against Russia.
In his book "The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden", its author Peter Bergen touched upon the moment when bin Laden arrived in Afghanistan from Sudan in 1996, when Khalid Sheikh Mohammed presented him with a plan to strike the two world trade towers in New York by plane for the first time.
early warning
Bergen recounts in his book that it was a young State Department intelligence analyst, Gina Bennett, who wrote the first classified memo warning of the danger from bin Laden in 1993.
As he was about to leave the White House, (former) President Bill Clinton warned his successor Bush Jr about bin Laden, as did outgoing National Security Adviser Sandy Berger with his successor Condoleezza Rice, according to the memoirs of the former White House counterterrorism coordinator Richard Clarke in his book "Against All Enemies" (Against All Enemies).
The conclusion that Clark reached - according to the Washington Post article - was simple, he wrote, "Unfortunately, it seems that America responds well to disasters only, and does not pay attention to warnings."
Clark added, "Our country seems unable to do what it must do until a terrible disaster strikes."
Journalists Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn, in their book "102 Minutes", recount some of the events that occurred inside the World Trade Center at the moment the first plane crashed into them.
The authors say that "the ferocity of the attacks meant life or death for innocents inside (the towers), because it depended on whether they moved away from the entrance or jumped into a closed elevator, or transferred the weight of their bodies from one foot to the other."
Senior Bush aides pushed him into the Iraq war (Al-Jazeera)
According to the Washington Post article, the towers embody the power of American capitalism, but their design was an embodiment of "American greed and its absurdity."
They were surprised
In his book "The Only Plane in the Sky", which includes an oral history of the events of September 11, its author, American journalist Garrett Graff, tells how Defense Department officials were surprised that an American Airlines plane crashed on its way. Number 77 in part of the Pentagon building, which had been improved and reinforced according to new building specifications against "terrorist" attacks.
In his article, writer Carlos Lozada cites Bob Woodward's book "Bush at War", which included the dialogues that President George W. Bush had with the national security team in his administration.
In his book, Woodward quotes Bush as saying in one of his interviews, "As commander in chief, I had to show the American people the determination and firmness needed to do whatever it took to win...no surrender...no equivocation."
I don't care about the law
In his aforementioned book, "Against Enemies," Richard Clarke recalls what happened on the evening of September 11, 2001, when Bush shouted at an official because he had told him that international law condemned the use of military force as a tool of revenge. He replied decisively, "I don't care." What the international lawyers are saying, we are determined to do what we want."
That president's message was unequivocal, as the Washington Post article notes;
"The law is an obstacle to effectively combating terrorism, and it is worrying that the minute procedural details have become obsolete in the world of 9/11 and are a vexing obstacle to carrying out the essential tasks we aspire to achieve."
Instead of ignoring the law, the Bush administration used it.
In that, investigative journalist Jane Mayer says, in her book published in 2008 under the title "The Dark Side", that then-Vice President Dick Cheney made sure - almost immediately after the September 11 attacks - that some of the smartest and best-trained lawyers in The United States, working secretly in the White House and the Department of Justice, came up with legal justifications that justify greatly expanding the government's authority to wage a war on "terrorism".
Dick Cheney, one of Bush's top aides who incited him to the Iraq war (French)
justification of torture
To understand what the US government may justify under the pretext of national security, it is necessary to look at the torture memos issued by the Office of the Legal Counsel of the Ministry of Justice between 2002 and 2005, which authorizes the Central Intelligence Agency to use interrogation methods for suspects of "terrorist" acts.
These methods include confinement in overcrowded spaces, sleep deprivation and water immersion, which have been redefined as “enhanced interrogation techniques”, a legal and linguistic misrepresentation intended to avoid describing them as torture.
According to Carlos Lozada, the lawyers who drafted those memos enabled the lawlessness.
American lawyer David Cole is quoted as saying in the introduction to his book, Torture Memos: Rationalizing the Unthinkable, that these memos are a pattern of practicing law in "bad faith";
The victim is the principle of the rule of law that the 9/11 Commission urged to adhere to.
They pushed him into the Iraq war
In his book entitled "To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America Into Iraq", the American journalist Robert Draper touched on the influence exerted by senior aides to President Bush to push him towards fueling the war in Iraq.
Those aides include Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and Vice President Dick Cheney, each with their own reasons.
In the context of his review of what was mentioned in the books issued during the past two decades dealing with the attacks of September 11 and their repercussions, Carlos Lozada quoted some of what was mentioned by the American journalist of Arab origin, Anthony Shadid, in his book under the title “Night Approaches: The Iraqi People in the Shadow of the American War” (Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War).
Who gave them the right?
In his 2005 book, Shadid quotes a woman from the suburbs of Baghdad who asked him, "What gives (Americans) the right to change something they don't have in the first place?"
The writer of the Washington Post article comments by saying that the United States, as soon as it turned from a liberating force to an occupying power, lost all the legitimacy it had.
Among the books reviewed in the article is a book by journalist Craig Whitlock entitled "Afghanistan Papers", in which he tackled the stark contrast between the reality of the war and the statements related to it.
will stay
In this regard, he said, "American officials did not need to lie or resort to spinning to justify the war."
There are two books, one entitled "Reign of Terror" by Spencer Ackerman, and the other under the name "Subtle Tools" by the American historian Karen Greenberg, in which they reached one conclusion that September 11 "will remain with us and not We are still living in its ruins."
In the book "The Forever War", author Dexter Filkins describes a country - meaning Afghanistan - that "something in it has fundamentally broken after several years of war, and that there is a fundamental imbalance, between cause and effect."
Carlos Lozada comments in the conclusion of his article in the Washington Post on the statement in the previous book by saying that Dexter Filkins meant Afghanistan, but his words have another double meaning that can be interpreted as it may withdraw to the United States in the past two decades.