-Caveat Lector- Euphorian spotted this on the Guardian Unlimited site and thought you should see it.
To see this story with its related links on the Guardian Unlimited site, go to http://www.guardian.co.uk Terrorism is truly a great evil and we've made it worse Our response has done nothing but increase the threat to liberty Hugo Young Monday September 09 2002 The Guardian A few months after 9/11, I wrote a column alluding to terrorism as the largest threat facing the world, and the campaign against it as inevitably the central concern of all right-thinking governments. The brutal crime committed on that September morning, and the global upheavals that have grown out of it, seemed to engulf all other crises. The event defined international, and even a lot of national, politics. What happened at the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon was inextinguishably prime. I wrote this without much thought. It seemed so obviously true. Such, I think, was the mindset of many people as the year 2001 turned into 2002. That casual judgment, however, did not pass unchallenged. There were and are those who reject the setting of terrorism as the priority of priorities, and regard this ranking as itself a threat to the peace of the world. I'm not referring here to the anti-American fellow travellers who have surfaced in the past year, and seem able to persuade themselves that Osama bin Laden is a folk hero. I mean people, mostly on the concerned and moderate western left, who regard the very elevation of terrorism to the top of the list as part of the problem, not the solution, an essential prop for the warrior mind of President Bush. Without it, for example, the US would still be a free country. Such has been the hysteria induced by 9/11 that Americans have seen some of their freedoms brutally whit tled way. Elements of the police state - nameless suspects, judgeless detentions, unlimited breaches of habeas corpus, for non-Americans and also in some instances US citizens - were swiftly imposed on the land of the free. Only now is a scattering of federal judges beginning to get a grip on this and ask questions. Such profoundly un-American activity has caused little outcry. It would not have been tolerated except in an atmosphere that reduces every problem other than terrorism to insignificance. What we lack, people began to say after the dust from the twin towers settled, is perspective. The simplistic priority has been married to simplistic solutions. Believing that the potential terrorist now defines the shape of everything, our rulers have imposed too much security, allocated vastly too many dollars to the Pentagon, and falsely inflated al-Qaida terrorism into a threat that justifies whole new assaults on the world order by the US and such allies as will go along with them. Only by raising terrorism into this giant ogre, threatening the lives of innocents all over the world, would it ever have been possible to soup up war fever against Iraq, a country that has not been shown to have anything to do with what happened a year ago tomorrow. That's another count by some of the moderate left against, primarily, George Bush and Tony Blair. The left looks, too, at the missed opportunities to do what really matters. Mesmerised by 9/11, they say, world leaders have hastened quicker than ever to neglect the environment, hunger and poverty. Those should be top of the list of any fair assessment of what deserves their attention. Terrorism, which can never be entirely wiped out, is a distraction. It should take its place in a balance sheet which records that, at a fundamental level, 9/11 really changed nothing in a world rife with injustice, violence and danger - especially the world as seen from Gaza, Cairo or Islamabad, and not just New York City. I wish I could agree with this call for mature insouciance, one year on. But I do not think it is rationally available. It seems to me that what happened has in no way been exaggerated, and that it did indeed profoundly change the world. What has happened since was not due to a misperception of the threat but to the sheer limitations of the mainly American technique and mindset in responding to it. A wholly new phenomenon was born that day, which makes every westerner, and every modernistic easterner, look over their shoulder every day of the week for the religious fanatic and suicide attacker who is stateless, nerve-less and unamenable to negotiation of any kind. The crime of 9/11 not only will never be forgotten, it set a benchmark and a precedent, entirely outside the state system, that legitimised in a certain kind of fundamentalist mind actions of a similar sort, against which we have to be on our guard at all times. There's no way this can be talked down, or smoothed out of existence. It imports into the modern world something the modern world has so far proved incapable of dealing with. The modern world, the target of these crimes, offers only old responses. The most valuable response would be intelligence, but we do not have it. This is without doubt the scariest aspect. Even on its own soil, the vast US intelligence apparatus has spent a year failing to track down the source of anthrax attacks on prominent individuals. In tracking al-Qaida, the CIA and the special forces appear to be almost as vainly impotent. Look at how close they said they got to Bin Laden in Tora Bora, before letting him slip. We learn that pinpoint intelligence efforts against such elusive enemies are extraordinarily difficult. So the alternative is introduced: sweeping laws, or non-laws, that gather up hundreds of ill-defined suspects for detentions and interrogations that have led, as far as we're allowed to know, nowhere. These desperate flailings are a substitute for effective action. They do incalculable harm to the quality of life of a great nation, without any compensating benefit. Terrorism is indeed the greatest threat to life, but the response can seemingly do no better than amplify the threat to liberty. The displacement effect is seen still more clearly, and more dangerously, over Iraq. Unable to catch Bin Laden, we turn to Saddam Hussein. Two different phenomena are parlayed into one. Attacking Iraq might conceivably unseat Saddam, though the legitimacy of doing so remains substantially wanting. But in any case, our leaders seem indifferent to the consequences for the original campaign, the post-9/11 super-priority, which was supposed to be against al-Qaida terrorism. Going into Iraq, whatever else it might achieve, will have the certain effect of recruiting more of the Islamic street to al-Qaida's misbegotten cause. Yet it was to further this possibility, and work out its logistics, that Mr Blair went to see Mr Bush at Camp David, their way of marking the first anniversary of 9/11. These enemies are all mightily dangerous. They offer plausible threats, though for Saddam any action would surely carry greater risk than for Bin Laden. There has been no mis-categorisation of the evils in the world, for without freedom from the suiciders, what state can organise itself to address inequality and injustice and other causes that seem to legitimise the terrorist? But our responses, so far, have made the problem worse. That's our inadequacy. It's why the anniversary finds the world, instead of buoyed by reassurance from the great defenders of order and legitimacy, uniquely depressed. · [EMAIL PROTECTED] Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance�not soap-boxing�please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'�with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds�is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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