[THS] Glenn Greenwald: Cause and Effect in the War on Terror

[The Harder Stuff in news and commentary]

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25794.htm



"I Consider Myself ... a Muslim Soldier."
Cause and Effect in the War on Terror

By Glenn Greenwald

June 22, 2010 "Salon" -- American discussions about what causes Terrorists to do
what they do are typically conducted by ignoring the Terrorist's explanation for why
he does what he does.  Yesterday, Faisal Shahzad pleaded guilty in a New York
federal court to attempting to detonate a car bomb in Times Square, and this
Pakistani-American Muslim explained why he transformed from a financial analyst
living a law-abiding, middle-class American life into a Terrorist:

    If the United States does not get out of Iraq, Afghanistan and other countries
controlled by Muslims, he said, "we will be attacking U.S.," adding that Americans
"only care about their people, but they don't care about the people elsewhere in the
world when they die" . . . .

    As soon as he was taken into custody May 3 at John F. Kennedy International
Airport, onboard a flight to Dubai, the Pakistani-born Shahzad told agents that he
was motivated by opposition to U.S. policy in the Muslim world, officials said.

    "One of the first things he said was, 'How would you feel if people attacked the
United States? You are attacking a sovereign Pakistan'," said one law enforcement
official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the interrogation reports are
not public. "In the first two hours, he was talking about his desire to strike a blow
against the United States for the cause."

When the federal Judge presiding over his case asked him why he would be willing
to kill civilians who have nothing to do with those actions, he replied:  "Well, the
people select the government. We consider them all the same" (the same rationale
used to justify the punishment of the people of Gaza for electing Hamas).  When the
Judge interrupted him to ask whether that includes children who might have been
killed by the bomb he planted and whether he first looked around to see if there
were children nearby, Shahzad replied:

    Well, the drone hits in Afghanistan and Iraq, they don't see children, they don't
see anybody. They kill women, children, they kill everybody. It's a war, and in war,
they kill people. They're killing all Muslims. . . .

    I am part of the answer to the U.S. terrorizing the Muslim nations and the Muslim
people.  And, on behalf of that, I'm avenging the attack.  Living in the United States,
Americans only care about their own people, but they don't care about the people
elsewhere in the world when they die.

Those statements are consistent with a decade's worth of emails and other private
communications from Shahzad, as he railed with increasing fury against the wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq, drone attacks, Israeli violence against Palestinians and Muslims
generally, Guantanamo and torture, and asked:  "Can you tell me a way to save the
oppressed? And a way to fight back when rockets are fired at us and Muslim blood
flows?"

This proves only what it proves.  The issue here is causation, not justification.   The
great contradiction of American foreign policy is that the very actions endlessly
rationalized as necessary for combating Terrorism -- invading, occupying and
bombing other countries, limitless interference in the Muslim world, unconditional
support for Israeli aggression, vast civil liberties abridgments such as torture,
renditions, due-process-free imprisonments -- are the very actions that fuel the anti-
American hatred which, as the U.S. Government itself has long recognized, is what
causes, fuels and exacerbates the Terrorism we're ostensibly attempting to address.

It's really quite simple:  if we continue to bring violence to that part of the world,
then that part of the world -- and those who sympathize with it -- will continue to
want to bring violence to the U.S.  Al Qaeda certainly recognizes that this is the case,
as reflected in the statement it issued earlier this week citing the war in Afghanistan
and support for Israel as its prime grievances against the U.S.  Whether that's what
actually motivates that group's leaders is not the issue.  They are citing those policies
because they know that those grievances resonate for many Muslims, who are willing
to support radical groups and support or engage in violence only because they see it
as retaliation or vengeance for the violence which the U.S. is continuously
perpetrating in the Muslim world (speaking of which:  this week, WikiLeaks will
release numerous classified documents relating to a U.S. air strike in Garani,
Afghanistan that killed scores of civilians last year, while new documents reveal that
substantial amounts of U.S. spending in Afghanistan end up in the hands of corrupt
warlords and Taliban commanders).  Clearly, there are other factors (such as
religious fanaticism) that drive some people to Terrorism, but for many, it is a causal
reaction to what they perceive as unjust violence being brought to them by the
United States.

Given all this, it should be anything but surprising that, as a new Pew poll reveals,
there is a substantial drop in public support for both U.S. policies and Barack Obama
personally in the Muslim world.  In many Muslim countries, perceptions of the U.S. --
which improved significantly upon Obama's election -- have now plummeted back to
Bush-era levels, while Obama's personal approval ratings, while still substantially
higher than Bush's, are also declining, in some cases precipitously.  As Pew put it:

    Roughly one year since Obama's Cairo address, America's image shows few signs
of improving in the Muslim world, where opposition to key elements of U.S. foreign
policy remains pervasive and many continue to perceive the U.S. as a potential
military threat to their countries.

Gosh, where would they get that idea from?  People generally don't like it when their
countries are invaded, bombed and occupied, when they're detained without
charges by a foreign power, when their internal politics are manipulated, when they
see images of dead women and children as the result of remote-controlled robots
from the sky.  Some of them, after a breaking point is reached, get angry enough
where they not only want to return the violence, but are willing to sacrifice their own
lives to do so (just as was true for many Americans who enlisted after the one-day
9/11 attack).  It's one thing to argue that we should continue to do these things for
geopolitical gain even it means incurring Terrorist attacks (and the endless civil
liberties abridgments they engender); as amoral as that is, at least that's a cogent
thought.  But to pretend that Terrorism simply occurs in a vacuum, that it's
mystifying why it happens, that it has nothing to do with U.S. actions in the Muslim
world, requires intense self-delusion.  How much more evidence is needed for that?

* * * * *

Three other brief points illustrated by this Shahzad conviction:  (1) yet again, civilian
courts -- i.e., real courts -- provide far swifter and more certain punishment for
Terrorists than do newly concocted military commissions; (2) Shahzad's proclamation
that he is a "Muslim soldier" fighting a "war" illustrates -- yet again -- that the way to
fulfill the wishes of Terrorists (and promote their agenda) is to put them before a
military commission or indefinitely detain them on the ground that they are "enemy
combatants," thus glorifying them as warriors rather than mere criminals (see this
transcript of a federal judge denying shoe bomber Richard Reid's deepest request to
be treated as a "warrior" rather than a common criminal); and (3) the Supreme
Court's horrendous decision yesterday upholding the "material support" statute is, as
David Cole explains, one of the most severe abridgments of First Amendment
freedoms the Court has sanctified in a long time; this decision was justified by the
need for courts to defer to executive and legislative branch determinations regarding
"war," proving once again that as long as this so-called "war" continues as a "war,"
the abridgments on our core liberties will be as limitless as they are inevitable.  At
some point, we might want to factor that in to the cost-benefit analysis of our state of
perpetual war (for more on yesterday's Supreme Court ruling, see my podcast
discussion from February with Shane Kadidal of the Center for Constitutional Rights,
counsel to the plaintiffs in this case, on the day the Court heard Oral Argument,
regarding the issues that case entailed).