Imperial Justice And Indian Frenzy
By Anand Teltumbde
04 June, 2011
Countercurrents.org
“Do unto others as you would have them do to you.”
-Luke 6:31
In the wee hours of May 2, President Barak Obama announced the killing of Osama Bin Laden saying “justice has been done”. Ending a manhunt of almost 10 years, he achieved closure of the 9/11 case and fulfilled his election promise. In a swift 40 minutes operation of an American counterintelligence and counterterrorism team of 79 people, code named Operation Geronimo, a prominent Native American leader of the Chiricahua Apache who fought against Mexico and the United States for their expansion into Apache tribal lands for several decades during the Apache Wars, unarmed Osama along with three other men and a woman were killed in a mansion in Abbottabad, Pakistan, without any intimation to the latter. Osama’s body was later disposed off into the sea.
There were varied reactions: expected jubilation in the US over the killing of their national enemy; bewilderment in people of Pakistan that Osama was found in their country and anger that the US could openly defy their territorial sovereignty and carry out the operation with impunity; media-mediated approval by many but a serious doubt by a few but saner ones about whether it was justifiable, seeing the portent of blatant defiance of international norms by the mighty. But the most comic reactions it evoked was in India, which vehemently wanted similar ‘surgical’ operation against its own enemies hiding in Pakistan.
Imperial ‘Justice’
The manner in which the 9/11 incident was used by the US to declare its ‘war on terror’ and Osama was constructed into its kingpin and hunted across mountains and ravines of Afghanistan, Pakistan and perhaps elsewhere, the world had taken his death for granted. As Obama described, he was responsible for the killing of thousands of men, women and children and hence deserved the death. Surprisingly few people raised voice against this process of doing justice to an unarmed old guy and four others against whom Obama would not have any iota of charge. The latter were absolutely innocent because neither they were criminal nor did they resist his Operation. They were done to death just with imperial arrogance. Even for Osama, it was just the American propaganda that he had masterminded the 9/11 attack. America could not provide a shred of evidence to establish his crime. He at best was a suspect and according to the international law and for that matter any jurisprudence deserved fair trial. But he was summarily done to death despite the circumstances that could allow his easy arrest.
Leave aside Osama, the operation was carried out in utter violation of the sovereignty of Pakistan. The US had temerity to explain that it deliberately kept Pakistan out of loop as it did not trust Pakistan. Instead of any apology for such a grave crime, the US defiantly declared that it would carry out more such attacks inside Pakistan. Just three days after Osama was killed, an US attack with remote-control aerial drones killed 15 people in Pakistan and wounded four. As per the CNN’s Islamabad bureau there were 17 drone attacks killing 44 people in Pakistan’s tribal region. There were 111 strikes in 2010, in which 957 innocent civilians were killed as per the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. Drone attack uses a programmed and unmanned aerial vehicle remotely controlled to strike targets supposedly with precision. The targets are reduced to carbonized bodies, only to be identified by unburnt limbs, flinging bystanders like dolls with shattered bones and fatal brain injuries. Osama was at least spared this horror by the Seals gunning him down but scores of innocent men, women and children in Afghanistan and Pakistan have not been as lucky. Handful though, but some U.S. officials have themselves broached the issue of whether it is right to use unmanned aerial vehicles against the real people labeled as “high value target” in faraway Pakistan or Afghanistan.
The US tries to cover up its crime with a fig leaf of an argument that it was a war action and not a police action; Obama was a war combatant and not a political leader. To decide what is war or not, US has a federal law that includes two bodies of code applicable to warfare – Title 10 and Title 50, the former protecting US troops from prosecution for murder or manslaughter when they kill an enemy soldier, and the latter relating to definitions of war and espionage, making the government's responsible for the consequences of armed conflict. Notwithstanding that they are the internal codes of the US, without any international sanction, many legal luminaries have opined that this was the CIA led and hence the Title 50 operation. In terms of the established jurisdiction it is clear that the US government has gone too far in playing the role of judge, jury and executioner. All its pretensions to legality of this operation cannot hide its imperial arrogance and injustice.
Who’s Criminal: Osama, Bush or Obama?
Osama is projected as a mastermind of the series of coordinated suicidal aerial attacks on 9 September 2001. On that morning, 19 Al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four commercial passenger jet airliners and intentionally crashed two of the airliners into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, killing everyone on board and many others working in the buildings. Both towers collapsed within two hours, destroying nearby buildings and damaging others. The hijackers crashed a third airliner into The Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C. The fourth plane crashed into a field near Shanksville in rural Pennsylvania while some of its passengers and flight crew attempted to retake control of the plane from the hijackers, who were to attack either the Capitol Building or the White House. There were no survivors from any of the flights. Nearly 3,000 victims and the 19 hijackers died in the attacks. This is the broad story given for public consumption but no explanation has ever come to the serious doubts raised against its veracity. Whether it is a simple energy balance, engineering details of structural collapse, chemical analyses of the remains, physical examination, or mathematical verifications, the story miserably failed on each count. As a result, the experts have organized ‘Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth’ [www.ae911truth.org] to systematically expose the truth behind the incident. While their efforts to know the people behind these attacks and their motives may not ever be complete, they have already concluded the above story as a lie. The air strike was used as an alibi but the twin towers and the nearby tower basically collapsed with controlled explosion, is proved beyond reasonable doubt. The story of Pentagon attack has been completely falsified. A three year independent investigation into it by the Southern California-based researchers has brought out new evidence which establishes that the violence in Arlington was not the result of a surprise attack by suicide hijackers, but rather a military blacked operation involving a carefully planned and skillfully executed deception.” [http://www.freedomfiles.org/war/pentagon.htm] The poor souls who gave their lives in a Jihad against America were trained in and protected by the US Military and Bush; they were mind controlled patsies used by the Military Industrial complex to put on a show for them. Interestingly, there were no Arabs listed on the Manifest and all four crashed flights had exact 20 percent occupancy.
All the evidence and analyses show that the entire 9/11 was an intricately concocted lie for accomplishing some strategic objectives. One may not ever know what these objectives were, how and whether they were accomplished by whom and when but one thing is sure that Osama Bin Laden could not be the mastermind of this project. He only came handy as a character constructed entirely by the US agencies to anchor the lie. The making of Osama as a terrorist or construction of Jehadi-Islam by the US goes back to 1980s and is fairly well documented. When Soviet forces occupied Afghanistan, the US skillfully converted the Afghan peoples’ resistance into a theocratic-terrorist movement. Osama was deputed by the CIA to Afghanistan to finance and oversee the resistance to the Soviets. How the US and the CIA created Osama and his network has been well-documented in the book “Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia” by Ahmed Rashid, published by the Yale University Press. Indeed, there is lot of weight in the thesis that the modern Jehadi-Islam is a byproduct of intrigues by the West to keep the Islamic world under its suzerainty, devoid of any kind of democratic processes and also to use it as a whipping boy occasionally whenever attention needs to be diverted from issues raised by anti-globalisation campaigners. Osama fitted in the scheme of 9/11 perfectly to project as a mastermind. His own admission should not count as it served him well in his natural evolution into an anti-US zealot. Thus the entire onus of crime of not only the 9/11 but thousands of death that followed thereafter shifts away from Osama.
Farcical Indian Reaction
The episode evoked most farcical reaction in India. Beyond approval of this imperial arrogance, the media created a nationalist hysteria that the US should declare Pakistan as a terrorist state; that India should carry out similar surgical operation to kill the likes of Dawood Ibrahim and Hafeez Saeed, hiding in Pakistan. If one went by the TV shows, there appeared complete consensus among the neoliberal generation assembled there. There was not the slightest qualm about the right or wrong or even the consideration of consequences. Given that it was a traditional Hindutva motto, once more the dangerous fusion of Hindu nationalism with neoliberalism was completely swaying over sanity. It culminated in a faux pa by our army general VK Singh endorsingly stating that the military was capable of carrying out such an attack if mandated. The frenzy came to an abrupt stop with Pakistan’s threat of dire consequences if any such misadventure is attempted. The issue is not whether India would actually execute such attacks, the issue is that the Indian elites think of it; aspire to be a regional bully, in complete disdain to the needs of vast majority of their own countrymen.
Dr Anand Teltumbde is writer, political analyst and civil rights activist with CPDR, Mumbai. Contact: [email protected]
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