American Terrorism - Part 1: We Must Not Look the Fool
A collage and multi-part essay examining the United States' tendency to label everyone and everything as part of a terrorist group except for their own government.
A note to subscribers: This posting is longer than what can be viewed in an email. If you would like to read the whole article, please go directly to the post on Substack here. This is going to be the first of several posts in a series looking at US-sponsored terrorism. I hope that you find it enlightening.
In 1964, the FBI sent an anonymous package to Martin Luther King Jr. In it, was audio recordings illegally obtained through the FBI’s extrajudicial bugging of King’s phone calls, as well as a letter. The audio recordings provided evidence of King’s extramarital affairs. The letter castigated King for his “hidious [sic] abnormalities” and threatened him with releasing the tapes to the public unless he killed himself before he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
This act of terror was carried out by the most powerful US law enforcement agency against the most prominent civil-rights leader at the time. This was just one of many hostile, antidemocratic, disruptive actions carried out by the FBI under its Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO). This program, officially running from 1956-1971, targeted peace activists, civil-rights groups, the feminist movement, socialists, communists, the Black Panthers, the Young Lords, and any other organization deemed to be a threat to the status quo and the prevailing social order. The FBI, in partnership with local police departments, infiltrated organizations, surveilled and harassed people, engaged in psychological warfare, got people fired, disseminated false information to the press, and even carried out political assassinations - as in the case of Black Panther Chairman Fred Hampton, whose murder was orchestrated by the FBI and the notorious Chicago Police.
The unconstitutional COINTELPRO was only revealed to the public in 1971 after a group of activists burgled an FBI office, stole classified documents, and leaked those documents to the press. Much of the media was reluctant to print the story until the Washington Post ran it on their front page in defiance of the Attorney General.
The resulting 1976 congressional “Church Committee”, named after the committee’s chairman Senator Frank Church, that was tasked with investigating the overreach of the intelligence community, found that:
the most serious breaches of duty were those of senior officials, who were responsible for controlling intelligence activities and generally failed to assure compliance with the law. Many of the techniques used would be intolerable in a democratic society even if all of the targets had been involved in violent activity, but COINTELPRO went far beyond that … the Bureau conducted a sophisticated vigilante operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of First Amendment rights of speech and association …
COINTELPRO is but one example of the litany of terroristic acts carried out by the United States specifically, and the Western powers more generally, against dissidents and minorities.
In 1974, Seymour Hersh reported that “the [CIA], directly violating its charter, conducted a massive, illegal domestic intelligence operation during the Nixon Administration against the antiwar movement and other dissident groups in the United States” that included “recruiting informants to infiltrate some of the more militant dissident groups.”
Using fear tactics and terroristic strategies is old hat for the United States. But the term “terrorist” is never to be used to describe the state. “Terrorist” is reserved only to be used by the elites against those they view as their enemies. State-sponsored terror is not terror, by definition, because the state only engages in righteous acts of violence that aim, not to perpetuate and expand its government’s and upper class’ interests, but to “protect our freedoms” against those who hate us.
The following is a short, incomplete list of various groups that Western governments have either currently or previously considered terrorist organizations or extremist groups.
Irish Republican Army – Various paramilitary groups fighting for Irish independence from British imperialism.
Irish National Liberation Army – Paramilitary wing of the Irish Republican Socialist Party dedicated to the independence of Ireland from the UK and the institution of a socialist Irish state.
African National Congress – The party of Nelson Mandela. Fought against the apartheid state of South Africa.
Palestine Liberation Organization – The official government of the state of Palestine.
Hamas – Palestinian organization dedicated to ending Israeli occupation of Palestinian land.
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – A leftist, secular, socialist party advocating for a one-state solution in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Earth Liberation Front – An eco-defense group using guerilla tactics to end the exploitation of the environment.
Animal Liberation Front – Group dedicated to ending the abuse and exploitation of animals, particularly on an industrial scale.
The KKK – White supremacist group based in the US.
Atomwaffen Division - White-supremacist, neo-Nazi group dedicated to the overthrow of governments.
Army of God – Leaderless, radical Christian, anti-abortion group responsible for murders of abortion providers and bombings of abortion clinics.
The Taliban – Islamic fundamentalist group, now the de facto government of Afghanistan.
Al Qaeda – Anti-Western Islamic extremist group.
Boko Haram - Radical Islamist group, based in Nigeria, dedicated to instituting an Islamic state.
Al-Shabaab - Radical Islamist Group, based in Somalia, affiliated with al Qaeda, dedicated to instituting an Islamic state.
Houthi Rebels – An Islamist Yemeni group currently fighting against the US-backed Saudi invasion of Yemen. Anti-Israeli and anti-US in its aims.
Hezbollah – A large Lebanese political party with an armed faction formed in response to the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon.
National Liberation Army (ELN) – A Columbian communist guerilla group dedicated to opposing Western imperialism in Columbia.
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) – A Columbian Marxist-Leninist peasant group dedicated to anti-imperialism and agrarianism.
Revolutionary Struggle – A Greek, leftist group dedicated to advancing anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, anti-globalist, and revolutionary anarchist aims. Attacked the US embassy in Greece in response to the US global war on “terror.”
Revolutionary People’s Liberation Front – A Turkish based Marxist-Leninist group dedicated to overthrowing the US-backed Turkish government.
PKK (Kurdistan Workers' Party) – A secular, leftist organization that has been fighting for the Kurds’ right to self-determination in the face of Turkish and Iraqi aggression.
Communist Party of the Philippines – A revolutionary group dedicated to overthrowing the government of the Philippines and removing US influence from the region.
Proud Boys – All-male, alt-right group espousing pro-Western, anti-feminist chauvinism.
Weather Underground - Leftwing, anti-imperialist organization dedicated to overthrowing the US government.
Symbionese Liberation Army - Radical leftwing organization. Attempted to fuse various leftist ideology with armed revolutionary struggle in the US.
Black Panther Party - A Black Power organization dedicated to anti-imperialism, mutual-aid within the Black community, and self-defense against police violence.
Antifa – A leftwing movement broadly opposed to fascist and rightwing politics.
Jan. 6 protesters – An amalgamation of various pro-Trump groups which stormed the US Capitol building following the election of Joe Biden.
Communist Party USA – Leftwing party advocating for a communist state. To this day, some states do not allow you to be a public school teacher if you are a member of the Communist Party.
This is just a smattering of the many groups and individuals considered to be enemies of the Western powers. Many, though not all, of those listed groups have committed violence and atrocities in furtherance of their ideologies. But their crimes pale in comparison to the terroristic, genocidal acts that have been wrought, either directly or indirectly, by the United States.
Before I go into some of the examples of US-sponsored terror, I want to address some counterpoints that readers may bring up. Firstly, to emphasize the terroristic acts of the US is not to simultaneously downplay or support terroristic acts committed against Western powers. Violence is violence - although there are degrees of it and there are legitimate arguments for self-defense. But focusing on the crimes of your own state, instead of the crimes of others for which you share no responsibility, is a more worthwhile action, particularly when your state is so adept at hiding its crimes and is punishing of those who expose its crimes.
“If you’re not with us, then you’re with the terrorists” is an infamous, tyrannical binary that has been used to shut down any criticism of US militarism since 9/11. The entire War on Terror has been an exercise in moral disaster and futility that has been abetted by US citizens, particularly those of the ruling elite, beating the drums for torture, invasion, indefinite detention, chauvinism, and demonization of others in the name of expressing our “values,” all the while downplaying and justifying the acts of terror committed by the US that have only produced everlasting enemies who have very good reason to hate us. As Erik Edstrom, a West Point graduate, combat veteran, and former platoon commander in Afghanistan writes in his book Un-American: A Soldier's Reckoning of Our Longest War:
The people who were trying to kill me weren’t international terrorists. They weren’t attacking me because “they hate our freedoms” or some other bullshit Bush-era line. They were angry farmers and teenagers with legitimate grievances. Their loved ones, breathing and laughing minutes before, had been transmuted before their eyes into something unrecognizable. Like someone hit a piñata full of raw hamburger meat. They were now little more than stringy sinew and bloody mashed potatoes dressed up in tattered rags. That’s what rockets fired from a pair of U.S. Kiowa helicopters do to civilians.1
Military violence that perpetuates such dire grievances abroad creates its own everlasting enemies. I need not add further admonishment to terroristic acts committed by our “enemies” when there is already plenty of that rhetoric to go around. I am concerned with the terror carried out by my own state because it is my state. I do not wash my hands of it and carry on. We all share a collective responsibility for the crimes of our empire.
Additionally, I focus on the crimes of my state because it is close to useless for me to castigate the atrocities committed by a foreign terrorist organization such as Boko Haram, a very easy thing to do, just as it is a mostly ineffectual and grandstanding act for me to decry the crimes against humanity carried out by a foreign country, such as China’s persecution of Uyghur Muslims. Me criticizing a foreign government has very little effect because I am not a citizen of that country, I do not live there, I do not hold power there, I have no say in their affairs, close to zero effect on their decisions, and it takes no courage whatsoever. But to criticize the crimes of your own country sends a much more powerful and potentially effectual statement. We need only look at the litany of examples of domestic dissidents who have harshly criticized US crimes - who then are surveilled and criminalized - to understand that internal resistance is far more threatening to the state than external resistance. This point is well articulated by Noam Chomsky when he said:
I focus my efforts against the terror and violence of my own state for really two main reasons. First of all, in my case the actions of my state happen to make up the main component of international violence in the world. But much more importantly than that, it's because American actions are the things that I can do something about. So even if the United States were causing only a tiny fraction of the repression and violence in the world - which obviously is very far from the truth - that tiny fraction would still be what I'm responsible for, and what I should focus my efforts against. And that is a simple ethical judgment. That is, the ethical value of one’s actions depends on their anticipated and predictable consequences. It is very easy to denounce the atrocities of someone else. That has about as much ethical value as denouncing atrocities that took place in the 18th century.
In the documentary Manufacturing Consent, Chomsky goes on to say:
These are not just academic exercises. We’re not analyzing the media on Mars or in the 18th century or something like that. We’re dealing with real human beings who are suffering and dying and being tortured and starving because of policies that we are involved in; we, as citizens of democratic societies, are directly involved in and are responsible for. And what the media are doing is insuring that we do not act on our responsibilities, and that the interests of power are served, not the needs of the suffering people, and not even the needs of American people who would be horrified if they realized the blood that is dripping from their hands because of the way they are allowing themselves to be deluded and manipulated by this system.
Additionally, to speak out against the injustices committed by a foreign nation or organization against its own people, with the intention of stirring some international involvement, supposes that your state’s response will be one of harm reduction, and not what it usually is - an excuse for hawkish interests to carry out everlasting wars of profit and power grabs. As we have seen time and again, justifications for endless wars - wars that enrich weapons manufacturers and line the pockets of our legislators who are bought and paid for by the monopolized defense industry, wars that lead to the deaths of mostly civilians - are justified with cynical arguments for protecting the human rights of those abroad.
There is a rotating cast of excuses for imposing our will on other nations, with disastrous results. It’s all about saving women from the Taliban, even though current US sanctions against Afghanistan, just like our drone strikes, are disproportionately harming innocent civilians - or it’s about overthrowing an odious dictator, who just so happens to be opposed to US control of their nation’s economic interests and would rather nationalize their energy industry than allow Western companies to extract their nation’s resources for profit - or it’s about eradicating evil communism, even though the communist and socialist parties in Indonesia, Vietnam, and Chile (just some of the nations that experienced US terror, meddling, and coups because they had the gall to assert independence from US dictates) were popular political organizations that were winning democratic elections.
We must stop spreading violence throughout the world under the guise of saving the world and spreading “freedom.” Our state’s actions are not misguided idealism anymore, if they ever were. US actions are borne of outright lies and concerted delusion with the goal of maintaining global economic and military hegemony over the peoples of the world with the support of a submissive and cowed citizenry. This comes at the expense of the lives of millions of people who dare to speak up or who are caught in the crossfire and then labeled as “collateral damage.”
I will be providing examples of American terror that span the War on Terror, the Israel-Palestine conflict, the Vietnam War, anti-Communist coups and subversions abroad, and domestic violations of first-amendment rights in the US, all in the name of stopping terror while in fact perpetuating state-sponsored terror.
Here are a few revealing examples:
The War on Terror
During the US invasion of Iraq in 2006, eleven Iraqi civilians, including five children -all of them five years old or younger - and four women, were killed in the town of Ishaqi in what the Pentagon initially described as an airstrike. But diplomatic cables leaked by Chelsea Manning and published by Wikileaks in 2010 revealed that a UN official, Philip Alston, sent a letter to the US embassy in Geneva at the time that documented credible differing accounts of that incident in Ishaqi. Villagers said that US soldiers attacked the house where the victims resided, entered the building, departed, and then called in an airstrike on the home. Autopsies of the bodies conducted at the nearby Tikrit hospital revealed that the victims were all shot in the head and handcuffed. Townspeople claimed that the airstrike was called to cover up the evidence of the executions.
These same claims were also made shortly after the incident by the Iraqi Joint Coordination Center in Tikrit in a report that said, “The American forces gathered the family members in one room and executed 11 persons, including five children, four women and two men. Then they bombed the house, burned three vehicles and killed their animals.” US military officials in Iraq said the accounts of townspeople who witnessed the events were unlikely to be true.
Iraqi television stations broadcasted images of the victims at the Tikrit hospital’s morgue. Alston, the UN official, said later in 2010 that he never received a response from the US to his letter.
The Pentagon conducted its own internal investigation at the time and found no wrong doing on the part of the US troops and refused to reveal which units might have been involved in the incident. After the leak of the conflicting UN account, the Pentagon said the incident was sufficiently investigated at the time and didn’t warrant further investigation.
In 2007, US mercenaries in Iraq, under the company name Blackwater, murdered 17 people and injured 20 others in Nisour square in an outburst of unprovoked violence. Mohammed Kinani, a survivor of the attack whose 9-year old son was killed that day, described the violence to his American lawyer who later wrote about it:
Bullets were everywhere. Mohammed would look to see what was happening. He saw the man next to him run. Machine gunfire tore through his body. Shots were fired everywhere. Mohammed could see other cars being shot. The Blackwater guards were firing indiscriminately. Iraqi traffic police initially tried to wave down the Blackwater men that there was no threat, but they too had to run for cover. Mohammed kept seeing the man on the ground next to him being fired upon as he lay dead. Machine gunfire would cause his lifeless body to shake in his pool of blood. In the middle of the attack, Mohammed could not understand why this man lying dead was a target. He could not understand what was happening or why.
After the mercenaries drove away, Mohammed checked on the rest of his family:
His sister was safe. He thought they had been given a miracle after he saw so many others killed. Then one of his sister’s children said that Ali was hurt. Mohammed quickly got out of the car and saw blood inside the rear window. Ali was slumped over against the glass. When Mohammed opened the door, his son fell toward him as his skull opened and a large part of Ali’s brain fell onto the pavement between his father’s feet. Video of the aftermath includes an image of a human brain on the road in Nisour Square.
Four of the mercenaries were eventually tried in US courts in 2014. One man was found guilty of murder and the other three of voluntary manslaughter. In 2020, president Trump pardoned the killers.
In 2005, US Marines killed 24 unarmed civilians in the town of Haditha, Iraq after their convoy was hit by an IED. After the explosion, Marines quickly killed five men standing by a nearby car. Squads of Marines then went into nearby houses and killed anyone inside.
Sgt. Sanick Dela Cruz was troubled by the killings and his participation in them. Dela Cruz was interviewed by the Chicago Magazine:
Dela Cruz says his squad leader pulled him aside. "He told me that if anybody asks about those guys—the five Iraqi males at the white car—that they were running away and the Iraqi army shot them," says Dela Cruz. At first, Dela Cruz recalls, he was confused. "Why would we have to lie if we didn't do anything wrong?" he says.
Dela Cruz went on to describe what he saw in one of the houses:
I . . . walked into the living room and remember seeing an old man laying dead on the floor in front of the door. I saw a woman lying dead at the end of the couch in that room, and I saw several children lying next to her at the end of the couch. I remember this house being badly burnt inside. I remember smelling burnt flesh and death. I didn't ask anyone what happened in this house, and I didn't really want to know.
A 9-year old girl who survived the attack, Iman Walid Abdul-Hameed, lost both her parents, two uncles, her grandmother, and a brother. She was interviewed after the massacre in Haditha, saying, “My mother was screaming and crying because she was shot and she fell on the ground bleeding in front of the bedroom door, and no one helped her…We were scared and could not move for two hours. I tried to hide under the bed.” Later, she said, "We want the Americans to be hurt just like us."
Shortly after the incident, with allegations of war crimes being levied, the Marine Corps brushed off the allegations as insurgent and al-Qaeda propaganda. The Washington Post reported that Major General Eldon A. Bargewell conducted a report of the massacre and concluded that “officers may have willfully ignored reports of the civilian deaths to protect themselves and their units from blame,” and that “commanders fostered a climate that devalued the life of innocent Iraqis to the point that their deaths were considered an insignificant part of the war.”
None of the Marines involved in the killings received any jail time. James Joyner, a professor at a Marine Corps college and an apologist for the murderers wrote in The Atlantic that the resulting military investigation “found that there was no grand plan to murder innocents or for execution-style killings. Rather, a group of angry, exhausted, and frightened Marines simply did not care whether the people they were killing were combatants.” This is an insulting non-distinction that makes no difference whatsoever, particularly to the people of Iraq.
More recently, in the US-led campaign against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, (though this campaign has been, from the beginning, not strictly about fighting ISIS, but also about supporting violent regime change in Syria - more on that later) The New York Times exposed the 2019 US military massacre of 80 people, including children, in an airstrike in Baghouz, Syria.
The attack occurred during fighting with Islamic State fighters at their last stronghold in Baghouz. The bombs fell on a crowd of civilians who were posing no threat. The Times reports that:
Without warning, an American F-15E attack jet … dropped a 500-pound bomb on the crowd, swallowing it in a shuddering blast. As the smoke cleared, a few people stumbled away in search of cover. Then a jet tracking them dropped one 2,000-pound bomb, then another, killing most of the survivors.
Military personnel watched the strike happen via drone footage at an air base in Qatar. Those monitoring the scene didn’t even know that a strike was impending.
“Who dropped that?” a confused analyst typed on a secure chat system being used by those monitoring the drone, two people who reviewed the chat log recalled. Another responded, “We just dropped on 50 women and children.” An initial battle damage assessment quickly found that the number of dead was actually about 70.
Aaron Maté of The Grayzone summarizes the investigation of the attack, saying that the military made every effort to cover up the nature of the strike: “The site of the bombing was bulldozed; the unit that conducted the strike vindicated itself; key evidence was buried; military logs were altered; and investigations were stalled and subverted.”
According to The Times, the devastating air strike was called by a secretive unit named Task Force 9, which was in charge of US ground operations in Syria. A military legal team, troubled by Task Force 9’s consistent disregard for the laws of warfare, began closely tracking the unit’s airstrikes. They found that “the unit appeared to be covering up the alleged war crimes violations by adding details to the strike log that would justify a self-defense strike,” such as “seeing a man with a gun, even when those details were not visible in the footage.”
Gihad Darwish, a videographer based in Syria, captured incomplete footage of the bombings:
Details of this attack only came to light because of whistleblowers who were frustrated at the lack of accountability. Lt. Col. Dean W. Korsak, an Air Force lawyer present at the Qatar air base where the massacre was observed, brought his concerns to the Air Force's Office of Special Investigations. In response, The Times reported that Korsak was told by an Air Force major that agents would not look into the attack because they only investigated civilian casualties when there was “potential for high media attention, concern with outcry from local community/government, concern sensitive images may get out.”
Another whistleblower at the Pentagon, Gene Tate, said:
Leadership just seemed so set on burying this. No one wanted anything to do with it… It makes you lose faith in the system when people are trying to do what’s right but no one in positions of leadership wants to hear it.
Incidents like this of civilian casualties caused by US-led forces is just one troubling aspect of the US involvement in Syria, a war which has not received congressional authorization and which goes against the will of the Syrian government. The US has long expressed imperial interests in the Middle East. General Wesley Clark revealed that Secretary of “Defense” Donald Rumsfeld drafted a plan before the invasion of Iraq to overthrow “seven countries in five years,” including Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, Lebanon, Somalia, and Sudan.
In its regime change efforts in Syria, William Van Wagenen notes that the US has partnered with antigovernment jihadists, including al-Qaeda, as far back as 2006. Aaron Maté points out that:
Although the US claims that its "sole purpose" in Syria is fighting ISIS, the US military has in fact barely done any fighting over the last two years. In 2019, now-senior Biden official Dana Stroul admitted that the US military occupation in Syria in "not only about completing the anti-ISIS fight." In reality, Stroul explained, occupying the "resource-rich", "economic powerhouse" region in Syria's northeast -- which contains the country's "hydrocarbons" and is its "agricultural powerhouse" -- gives the U.S. government "broader leverage" to influence "a political outcome in Syria" in line with US dictates.
The CIA has spent billions of dollars over the course of the war in Syria funding, training, and giving weapons to jihadists and al-Qaeda affiliated groups bent on overthrowing the Assad government in Syria. Maté notes that:
Citing a "knowledgeable US official," the Post's David Ignatius reported in 2017, the "many dozens of militia groups" given "many hundreds of millions of dollars" by the CIA "may have killed or wounded 100,000 Syrian soldiers and their allies over the past four years."
A Human Rights Watch report notes that US-funded insurgents in Syria in 2013 committed "the systematic killing of entire families" in an assault that killed up to 190 civilians.
One resident in the hamlet between the villages of Blouta and al-Hamboushieh described how he was able to flee his home with his mother as fighters entered his neighborhood but that he had to leave his elderly father and blind aunt behind in their house because of their physical infirmness. He said that when he returned to the hamlet after the government retook the area he found that his father and aunt had been killed.
In its quest for regime change and total dominance in the region, the US is willing to provide material support to anyone, including groups that it considers terrorist organizations, regardless of the human cost. (Ironically, if you as a powerless individual so much as donate 50 cents to any organization the US considers to be on their terrorist list, you will be locked up for decades for providing “material support.”)
Since 2014, Airwars estimates that between 8,164–13,218 civilians have been killed by airstrikes alone in the US-led campaign in Iraq and Syria.
In addition to overt acts of warfare, the US has instituted sanctions on Syria, a classic act of destabilization that disproportionately harms the most vulnerable of the population and can lead to massive starvation in already poor countries. Sanctions are a form of terror used to bend sovereign nations to the will of Western powers, and yet people defend them as “diplomatic.”
Looking to the US war in Afghanistan, in 2010, the US military killed 27 Afghani civilians and injured 12 others in a helicopter attack in Uruzgan province. The innocents were driving in a caravan of three vehicles, unwittingly towards a group of ground troops.
Even though none of the victims were posing a threat, and video footage showed the presence of at least one child, transcripts from drone operators before the killings demonstrate that the operators were practically drooling, trying to find any reason to justify an attack:
Mission intelligence controller: Screener said at least one child near SUV.
Sensor: Bullshit ... where? Send me a fucking still [picture]. I don't think they have kids at this hour, I know they're shady, but come on.
Pilot: At least one child ... Really? Listing [him as a] MAM [military-aged male]—that means he's guilty.
Sensor: Well maybe a teenager, but I haven't seen anything that looks that short, granted they're all grouped up here, but.
Mission intelligence controller: They're reviewing.
Pilot: Yeah, review that shit ... Why didn't he say possible child, why are they so quick to call fucking kids but not to call shit a rifle.
Later on:
Pilot: They're praying.
Sensor: This is definitely it. This is their force. Praying? I mean, seriously, that's what they do.
Mission intelligence coordinator: They're going to do something nefarious.2
Here we have members of the military angry at the prospect of not being able to relieve their hard-on for killing because a child was present, and thus they labeled the child as a military-aged male so that the child would be “guilty.” The operators also demonstrated a breathtaking ignorance about the common act of praying in Muslim society. These are the people pulling the triggers of our empire.
In response to these killings, the head of the Uruzgan provincial council said, "We don't want their apologies or the money they always give after every attack. We want them to kill all of us together instead of doing it to us one by one."
Such violent examples are litany. In 2021, as the US was retreating from Afghanistan after 20 years of bloodshed, lies, and trillions of dollars wasted on the military industrial complex, a drone strike killed 10 innocent civilians in Kabul. The military initially claimed the strike had eliminated an ISIS car bomb threat and described it as a “righteous strike.” One wonders what would have happened if the strike had not occurred in Kabul, a capital city well-travelled by foreign journalists. Would the military have casually scoffed at local reports that the strike had actually killed 10 innocents - seven of them children -just as it did after the initial reports of the killings in Ishaqi and Haditha? As Micah Zenko, a political scientist and expert on the U.S. drone program points out in The Intercept:
There have probably been between 350 to 400 of these kinds of strikes in Pakistan alone, of which we have no documentary evidence. In this case [the Kabul strike] the military only adjusted its narrative because independent third-party investigators were able to dig deeper than they did.
The New York Times released unedited footage of the drone strike after it was declassified:
Predictably, the military conducted its own investigation of the strike and found no criminal liability. Additionally, no US troops will face any disciplinary actions. A fitting end to the US war in Afghanistan, indeed.
Since 2001, approximately 164,436 Afghanis have died in the conflict.
Looking at the US-supported war in Yemen, the US has been giving Saudi forces billions of dollars in arms sales as well as material support and guidance to the airstrikes being carried out against the Houthis and the civilian population.
In 2013, a US drone strike killed 12 people attending a wedding party in Yemen. Two initial government investigations claimed that no civilians were killed in the strike.
In 2018, another coalition airstrike in Yemen hit a wedding party, killing 22 people, including the bride. According to The Guardian, “Footage that emerged from the scene of the airstrike shows scattered body parts and a young boy in a green shirt hugging a man’s lifeless body, screaming and crying.”
Yet another bombing in Yemen in 2018, that hit a school bus, killed at least 26 children and wounded at least 19 more. Human Rights Watch “identified remnants of US-origin munitions at the site of more than two dozen attacks,” in Yemen, “including the 2018 attacks on the wedding and the bus.”
The war in Yemen is being led by Saudi Arabia which has been receiving US arms and logistical support for the war since its inception. The United Nations estimates that 377,000 Yemenis have died in the conflict so far due to direct and indirect action. The UN report calls the situation in Yemen the worst current humanitarian crisis, with 15.6 million people living in extreme poverty and on the verge of famine.
The Iraqi novelist, Sinan Antoon, wrote an article in 2018 in The New York Times titled “Fifteen Years Ago, America Destroyed My Country.” He is scathing towards the official line Washington peddled about “liberating” the Iraqi people from dictatorship:
The United States had consistently supported dictators in the Arab world and was not in the business of exporting democracy, irrespective of the Bush administration’s slogans… Moreover, having lived through two previous wars (the Iran-Iraq war of 1980 to 1988 and the Gulf War of 1991), I knew that the actual objectives of war were always camouflaged by well-designed lies that exploit collective fear and perpetuate national myths.
The US invasion of Iraq destabilized the entire region and opened the door for the nihilistic death cult known as ISIS. The human costs of the war are immeasurable. Antoon goes on:
No one knows for certain how many Iraqis have died as a result of the invasion 15 years ago. Some credible estimates put the number at more than one million. You can read that sentence again. The invasion of Iraq is often spoken of in the United States as a “blunder,” or even a “colossal mistake.” It was a crime. Those who perpetrated it are still at large. Some of them have even been rehabilitated thanks to the horrors of Trumpism and a mostly amnesiac citizenry. (A year ago, I watched Mr. Bush on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show,” dancing and talking about his paintings.) The pundits and “experts” who sold us the war still go on doing what they do. I never thought that Iraq could ever be worse than it was during Saddam’s reign, but that is what America’s war achieved and bequeathed to Iraqis.
A dark chapter of the US war in Iraq, Abu Ghraib prison provided irrefutable visual evidence of the crimes of our empire. Empires always treat human beings as objects for plunder and degradation. And the fact that many of the key abuses of Abu Ghraib - torture, murder, sexual abuse, and rape - were carried out and overseen by women soldiers against Iraqi civilians, demonstrates the moral and intellectual vapidity of demands for “diversity” and “inclusion” within odious systems of control and death. Empires do not care who are operating the levers of power - whether it is a minority woman operating a drone, or a gay immigrant guarding prisoners - so long as the machinery stays functional.
Prolific writer Barbara Ehrenreich commented on the Abu Ghraib torture:
The struggles for peace and social justice and against imperialist and racist arrogance, cannot, I am truly sorry to say, be folded into the struggle for gender equality. What we need is a tough new kind of feminism with no illusions. Women do not change institutions simply by assimilating into them, only by consciously deciding to fight for change. (. . .) In short, we need a kind of feminism that aims not just to assimilate into the institutions that men have created over the centuries, but to infiltrate and subvert them. To cite an old, and far from naïve, feminist saying: “If you think equality is the goal, your standards are too low.” It is not enough to be equal to men, when the men are acting like beasts. It is not enough to assimilate. We need to create a world worth assimilating into.3
Secretary of War Donald Rumsfeld approved torture techniques, “including stress positions, removal of clothing, use of phobias (such as fear of dogs), and deprivation of light and auditory stimuli -- in December 2002 for detainees at the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. His OK prompted interrogators in Afghanistan and Iraq to adopt the aggressive techniques.”
At Abu Ghraib, low-level soldiers and their officers defended what they did with the, “we were only following orders” defense, an excuse which was rightfully repudiated during the Nuremberg trials of Nazi criminals. While it is true that the responsibility for these crimes goes all the way up the chain of command, no one can hide behind the orders that they received or the Bush legal memos that were used to justify torture of detainees at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and at CIA black sites around the world. Everyone is personally responsible for the crimes against humanity that they commit. And the US signed on to the Treaty Against Torture, and as such it has international responsibilities to try torturers and those who authorized torture in a court of law. Instead, the US promotes torturers such as Gina Haspel to the rank of CIA director, it lets former US presidents and Secretaries of War go on living and dying in peace, thus violating international laws and treaties, adding salt in the wounds of our victims, and demonstrating that our “commitments” to democracy and human rights are farcical.
After the election of Barack Obama, this country’s last best chance to hold Bush-era war criminals accountable, the Justice Department and the Obama administration defended the criminals. Journalist Jeremy Scahill commented:
Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Division Tony West wrote that “the type of activities alleged against the individual defendants were ‘foreseeable’ and were ‘a direct outgrowth’ of their responsibility to detain and gather intelligence from suspected enemy combatants.” In defending the government’s position, West cited case law, stating “genocide, torture, forced relocation, and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment by individual defendants employed by Department of Defense and State Department were within scope of employment,” and similar cases justifying CIA torture as part of official duty.
You can read that again. Genocide, torture, cruel and inhuman treatment, and kidnapping are all within the scope of employment. This is what our country does. And no one can be held accountable.
The United States has very good reason to maintain its global hegemonic dominance over other countries, because if that was ever lost, our many war criminals would have to actually face justice on the international stage; Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Henry Kissinger, Gina Haspel, George Tenet, Michael Hayden, Leon Panetta, John Brennan, the list goes on and on. Each one of them has enough evidence against them to be found guilty in a court of law and they would be rightfully hanged just like the Nazis.
For the US-sponsored acts of terror that I have mentioned so far, it may be argued that these are all just the regular, natural incidents of atrocities that occur in war. These killings and torture of civilians, whether accidental or intentional, are regrettable. They may even be the inevitable result of imperial actions. But to call these incidents acts of terror goes too far because terroristic acts are usually ideologically motivated and targeted against a populace, mostly civilians, in order to cause political or societal change. Therefore, these unfortunate and even deplorable acts of killing that have taken place in the War on Terror do not meet the standard of “terrorism.”
Firstly, to that, I ask, what is the War on Terror if not a war of ideology, mostly affecting civilians, carried out to institute broad political and societal changes through militarism, torture, death, surveillance, the gutting of civil liberties, the abandonment of the rule of law, and, finally, terror? And how is such massive death that has been carried out in the Middle East, the attempts at regime change and control of sovereign nations, and missiles falling from the sky taking out whole families with no recourse for seeking justice, not utterly terrorizing of the people who live there?
Murtaza Hassain, writing about an interview he did in Jordan with the radical jihadist cleric Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, says:
I got a sense of why war seemed endless for this region. So many people have been born into situations that seem utterly devoid of hope. For them, there is no question of simply walking away: This is their life. Whatever Americans ultimately choose to do with their wars, they should count themselves lucky that they at least have the option to step back from conflicts that are so painful and intractable. Those who are truly trapped in them live on promising ground for extremists, whether ideologues like Maqdisi or the young men that he influences.
A violently terrorized and victimized people do not automatically become docile out of fear. Their very victimization gives the people every reason to keep fighting, particularly when their prospects are so bleak. As James Baldwin said:
[I]t is ultimately fatal to create too many victims. The victor can do nothing with these victims, for they do not belong to him, but – to the victims. They belong to the people he is fighting. The people know this, and as inexorably as the roll call – the honor roll – of victims expands, so does their will become inexorable: they resolve that these dead, their brethren, shall not have died in vain. When this point is reached, however long the battle may go on, the victor can never be the victor: on the contrary, all his energies, his entire life, are bound up in a terror he cannot articulate, a mystery he cannot read, a battle he cannot win – he has simply become the prisoner of the people he thought to cow, chain, or murder into submission.4
These wars we engage in endlessly justify themselves. We should not be surprised when those the wars harm most lash out against the perceived perpetrators.
Although it may be said that the incidents of terror I have described thus far were mainly carried out by lower-level officials, there are many other troubling aspects of the War on Terror, including overt acts of terror, that have been carried out and orchestrated, not just by ground soldiers, air force bombers, and drone operators in the usual course of warfare, but by the upper echelons of the US government.
Here are some examples of these terroristic acts:
In 2010, President Obama directed the CIA to assassinate an American citizen in Yemen, Anwar al-Awlaki, despite the fact that he had never been charged with a crime.
After reports emerged that Obama had ordered the assassination of Awlawki, Nasser al-Awlaki, Anwar’s father, worked with the ACLU to file an injunction against the impending extrajudicial execution. In response, Spencer Ackerman notes in his book, Reign of Terror, the Justice Department:
argued that Nasser had no right to sue, since the apparatus of state secrecy prevented him from actually knowing the government was targeting Anwar. In keeping with the courts’ typical Forever War posture, Judge John Bates proclaimed himself powerless, despite acknowledging that the “somewhat unsettling” result of his abdications would be to make potential executions of U.S. citizens “judicially unreviewable.” Lamented ACLU attorney Jameel Jaffer, “It would be difficult to conceive of a proposition more inconsistent with the Constitution or more dangerous to American liberty.”5
And so, to prevent undue impositions on the US president’s right to assassinate American citizens, the government argues that you’re not supposed to know who they’re intending to kill, because it is a state secret, and therefore you cannot bring such a claim to court. This Kafkaesque argument makes it wildly clear that we do not live in a state that is ordered by democracy, the rule of law, or constitutional safeguards.
As journalist Glenn Greenwald wrote after the reports of the assassination orders:
No due process is accorded. No charges or trials are necessary. No evidence is offered, nor any opportunity for [Awlaki] to deny these accusations (which he has done vehemently through his family). None of that.
Instead, in Barack Obama's America, the way guilt is determined for American citizens -- and a death penalty imposed -- is that the President, like the King he thinks he is, secretly decrees someone's guilt as a Terrorist… It is simply asserted that Awlaki has converted from a cleric who expresses anti-American views and advocates attacks on American military targets (advocacy which happens to be Constitutionally protected) to Actual Terrorist "involved in plots." … And the punishment is thus decreed: this American citizen will now be murdered by the CIA because Barack Obama has ordered that it be done. What kind of person could possibly justify this or think that this is a legitimate government power?
Any argument for such extrajudicial murder made on the grounds that purported terrorists are really bad and dangerous people that need to be done away with as quickly as possible fails to recognize the importance of due process, the principle of innocent until proven guilty, and, not least of all, that these claims of terrorism are being made by the CIA and the “intelligence” community, institutions which have a well-documented history of human-rights abuses, torture, and aiding and abetting violent coups and atrocities; not to mention the fact that, according to Torture Report author Daniel Jones, the CIA itself “acknowledged that nearly a quarter of those it held as suspected terrorists should never have been detained [in Guantanamo Bay].” Even former Bush officials have said that most Guantanamo detainees are innocent. And, the “intelligence” that officials rely on to order drone assassinations is often flawed, leading to civilian casualties. During a 5-month period in Afghanistan, nine out of ten people killed in airstrikes were not the intended targets.
We should never take the claims and pronouncements from the CIA, NSA, FBI, DHS, ICE, or any other intelligence agency at face value, particularly concerning matters of life and death.
In September 2011, Anwar al-Awlaki was killed by a drone strike in northern Yemen. Samir Khan, also an American citizen, who published similar jihadi exhortations as Awlaki, was also killed in the strike. Two weeks later, another drone strike hit a barbecue attended by Awlaki’s 16-year old son, Abdulrahman, himself an American citizen, killing him, his 17-year old cousin, and seven other people.
In 2017, the Trump administration ordered a raid in central Yemen, carried out by SEAL Team 6, that killed at least 25 civilians, including nine children, one of whom was 8-year old Nawar, the daughter of Anwar al-Awlaki.
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism conducted a report on the 2017 raid that found: “Of the nine young children who died, the smallest was only three months old. Eight women were killed, including one who was heavily pregnant. Seven more women and children were injured.”
The report quotes one survivor of the attack:
“It is true they were targeting al Qaeda but why did they have to kill children and women and elderly people?” said Zabnallah Saif al Ameri, who lost nine members of his extended family, five of whom were children. “If such slaughter happened in their country, there would be a lot of shouting about human rights. When our children are killed, they are quiet.”
Imagine if, instead of the United States only hearing about the tragedies of its own citizens being victimized, we were also subjected to the heartache of the victims we create abroad. As Greenwald commented after the deadly raid in Yemen:
By dramatizing the deaths of Americans while disappearing the country’s victims, this technique ensures that Americans perpetually regard themselves as victims of horrific, savage, tragic violence but never the perpetrators of it. That, in turn, is what keeps Americans supporting endless war: These savages keep killing us, so we have no choice but to fight them.
Images of atrocities in Vietnam were a powerful force for the antiwar movement. The US government knows this and therefore it must control the narrative. That is why the US classifies as many documents as it can, criminalizes whistleblowers and even the journalistic publication of state crimes, and only officially sanctions war correspondents who remain imbedded with military personnel and who submit to allowing their reports to be screened by the military before publication.
The media plays a key role in trumpeting criminal wars when “journalists” remain deferential to intelligence agencies, parroting their pronouncements, and never questioning the national myth of American exceptionalism.
To date, at least seven US citizens have been killed in targeted drone assassinations. Of those, only one, Anwar al-Awlaki, was the intended target.
In January 2020, Donald Trump approved the murder of Iranian general Qassim Soleimani in a drone strike that took place in Iraq.
Imagine if US General David Petraeus was travelling in Canada and was assassinated by Iranian agents. The response to such an attack would be apocalyptic.
And yet, we are told that the murder of Soleimani, a general of a country who we are not engaged in a congressionally authorized war with and who was responsible for organizing the Iranian campaign against ISIS, is a righteous act that must be submitted to by the American people and the people of Iran.
As Jeremy Scahill commented:
There’s no justification for assassinating foreign officials, including Suleimani. This is an aggressive act of war, an offensive act committed by the U.S. on the sovereign territory of a third country, Iraq. This assassination and the potential for a war it raises are, unfortunately, consistent with more than half a century of U.S. aggression against Iran and Iraq.
In its quest for maintaining total dominance in the region, the United States materially supports anti-Iranian regimes such as the oil-rich Saudi Arabia, which is largely responsible for the genocidal war against Houthi rebels in Yemen, gives funding to groups such as al-Qaeda, and has a horrible record of depriving women of their human rights; the apartheid state of Israel that treats the Palestinian people as mere playthings; and the gangster-state of the United Arab Emirates.
The branches of the US government are beholden to the money and power of the well-financed lobbies of Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. This influence expresses itself troublingly when US teachers are barred from teaching because they will not sign a loyalty oath to Israel; or when US intelligence agencies refuse to declassify documents because they potentially show substantial links between Saudi Arabia and the 9/11 perpetrators; or when the US continues to sell weapons to Saudi Arabia even after the crown prince was implicated in the assassination of US resident Jamaal Khashoggi; or when, even after public outcry over the genocidal Saudi-led war in Yemen gets Congress to vote on blocking millions of dollars in arms sales to the kingdom, congress votes it down and allows the sales to continue.
9/11 was the perfect excuse for an imperial state that already had dastardly machinations in the making to carry out its violent schemes for imperial domination of the Arab world. The War on Terror has killed millions of people and has made the American people less free, not just in the more obvious, 1984 ways of mass surveillance and criminalization of whistleblowers, but also in other ways, in how George Orwell and thinkers such as Edward Said and James Baldwin have described the effects of empire.
Baldwin wrote:
For a very long time, for example, America prospered – or seemed to prosper: this prosperity cost millions of people their lives. Now, not even the people who are the most spectacular recipients of the benefits of this prosperity are able to endure these benefits (…) they cannot, or dare not, assess or imagine the price paid by their victims, or subjects, for this way of life, and so they cannot afford to know why the victims are revolting. (…) The representatives of the status quo are sickened and divided, and dread looking into the eyes of their young; while the excluded begin to realize, having endured everything, that they can endure everything.6
The innocence that those who are the benefits of empire view themselves with is utterly revolting to their victims. And beyond that, inheriting an empire forces you into a position of inhumanity that was deftly described by Orwell in his essay “Shooting an Elephant.” In Burma, a country colonized by the British empire, Orwell, as a member of the British military, was tasked with killing a rampaging elephant that had killed a local Burmese man, who Orwell labeled a “coolie.” He writes:
The sole thought in my mind was that if anything went wrong those two thousand Burmans would see me pursued, caught, trampled on and reduced to a grinning corpse like that Indian up the hill. And if that happened it was quite probable that some of them would laugh. That would never do. (…) When I pulled the trigger I did not hear the bang or feel the kick – one never does when a shot goes home – but I heard the devilish roar of glee that went up from the crowd. (…) And afterwards I was very glad that the coolie had been killed; it put me legally in the right and it gave me a sufficient pretext for shooting the elephant. I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.
To this day, more than 20 years after 9/11, there are people wasting away in Guantanamo bay, having endured the unimaginable horrors of torture, and who the United States refuses to release or to put on trial, because it would mean admitting defeat, facing the fact that even those who are credibly guilty cannot be put on trial because their having been tortured invalidates the case, and our empire will look the fool. That will simply not do.
And so we go on, endlessly, creating everlasting enemies, sapping our collective souls, all in the name of peace and security.
The US spent $2 trillion directly on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, with another $2 trillion estimated to be spent on veterans affairs.
Pentagon spending has totaled over $14 trillion since the start of the war in Afghanistan, with one-third to one-half of the total going to mercenaries.
We may never know the true human cost of the US-led wars against terror, but organizations such as Airwars, Human Rights Watch, and the Costs of War Project are carrying out difficult work to maintain a public accounting.
Thank you for reading part 1.
The examples provided so far are but a small selection of the many atrocities carried out by the United States in the War on Terror, let alone across its entire history. In the next installments, I will be looking more closely at the US support of Israel as well as the insane anti-communist ideology that has driven US domestic and foreign policy since the end of WWII and which has led to the deaths of millions of people abroad and the demonization and criminalization of those at home.
Stay tuned.
And as you can maybe tell, this piece has taken a while to write and I really did not expect this article to be so involved, let alone be long enough to split into multiple parts. At first, I just wanted to include a few key facts to go along with the collage I made. But now it’s turned into this. I am passionate about these subjects and it takes a lot of time and work to research and write it out. I also have a fulltime job, so this is just an unpaid side gig at the moment. If you find value in this work, please share it with a friend.
There’s no use howling into the void if no one else is around to hear it.
And the next time you spot a war criminal, please make an informed decision about your actions.
Thank you.
Erik Edstrom, "Three Visions," foreword to Un-American: A Soldier's Reckoning of Our Longest War (New York, NY: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020).
Andrew Cockburn, "Remember, Kill Chain," in Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins (New York, NY: Henry Holt and Company, 2015.)
Barbara Ehrenreich, "What Abu Ghraib Taught Me," in Had I Known: Collected Essays (New York, NY: Twelve, 2020), 207.
James Baldwin, "No Name in the Street," in James Baldwin: Collected Essays (New York, NY: Library of America, 2008), 406-407.
Ackerman, Spencer. "Obama and the 'Sustainable' War on Terror," in Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump, (New York, NY: Penguin Random House, 2021), 134-35.
Baldwin, Ibid.