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ABSTRACT

SEPTEMBER 11 AS “MACHIAVELLIAN STATE TERROR”

David MacGregor

(macgregor12b@.mac.com)

This article will appear in--

*The Hidden History of 9-11-2001, Research in Political Economy*,
Volume 23, P. Zarembka, editor, Amsterdam: Elsevier, forthcoming in
Spring 2006.

[QUOTE]
Pyrotechnic effects and spectacular death belong to the symbolism of terror and political assassination—bizarre techniques of miscommunication through fear practiced on the innocent and designed to effect social change. While focusing on the use of terror in 9-11, this article deals with both terror and political assassination as closely related communicative practices of death. It outlines a theory of terrorism that suggests September 11 may be an example of expedient terrorist destruction ordered from within the state, a macabre instance of a state protection racket. Commentators on the left tend to see terrorism as a blow extended by the oppressed against exploiters. However, terrorism is much less likely to be a manifestation of a revolt by—or on behalf of—the underprivileged than a demonstration of brute force by the state or its agents. Machiavellian state terrorism is terror/assassination performed for reasons different from the publicized ones; often initiated by persons or groups other than those suspected of the act; and—most important—secretly perpetrated by, or on behalf, of the violated state itself. Machiavellian state terror advances the ruling agenda while disguising itself as the work of individuals or groups opposed to the state’s fundamental principles. As an example, the article reviews a mysterious 1971 assassination in Paris that obliquely foreshadows some critical elements of the official story of 9-11. The article underlines the importance of oppositional theorizing: questioning government and looking for connections between events are critical features of what it means to be vitally active in the political universe.
SEPTEMBER 11 AS “MACHIAVELLIAN STATE TERROR”

David MacGregor

ELEVENTH DRAFT: DO NOT CITE THIS PAPER WITHOUT PERMISSION

It is even probable that the terrorists (like the experts!) did not anticipate the collapse of the Twin Towers, which was, far more than (the attack of) the Pentagon, the deepest symbolic shock. The symbolic collapse of a whole system is due to an unforeseen complicity, as if, by collapsing (themselves), by suiciding, the towers had entered the game to complete the event.
Jean Baudrillard

[A] wise prince must, whenever he has the occasion, foster with cunning some hostility so that in stamping it out his greatness will increase as a result.
Machiavelli

But you act like America wouldn't destroy two buildings
In a country that was sponsoring bombs dropped on our children
I was watching the Towers, and though I wasn't the closest
I saw them crumble to the Earth like they was full of explosives
And they thought nobody noticed the news report that they did
About the bombs planted on the George Washington bridge
Four Non-Arabs arrested during the emergency
And then it disappeared from the news permanently
Immortal Technique, “Cause of Death” Lyrics

Yet the world on its own is dark.
G.W.F. Hegel


1. Introduction

Pyrotechnic effects and spectacular death belong to the symbolism of terror and political assassination—bizarre techniques of miscommunication through fear practiced on the innocent and designed to effect social change. Terror and assassination strike victims without warning, and may turn the flow of history. While focusing on the use of terror in 9-11, this paper deals with both these communicative practices of death.

“[A] wise prince,” advises Machiavelli (1979a, p. 148) , “must, whenever he has the occasion, foster with cunning some hostility so that in stamping it out his greatness will increase as a result.” I introduce a theory of terrorism inspired by Machiavelli’s observation. September 11 may be an example of expedient destruction ordered from within the state, a macabre instance of a state protection racket. What I call, Machiavellian state terrorism is terror/assassination performed for reasons different from the publicized ones; often initiated by persons or groups other than those suspected of the act; and—most important—secretly perpetrated by, or on behalf, of the violated state itself. Machiavellian state terror advances the ruling agenda while disguising itself as the work of individuals or groups opposed to the state’s fundamental principles. I present as an example, an obscure 1971 assassination in Paris that obliquely foreshadows some critical elements of the official story of 9-11. I conclude with a discussion of the importance of oppositional theory for maintaining a lively and democratic public discourse.

Terror and Assassination

A sociological study on the history of political murder examines “the rhetoric of assassinations”: killing as a textual event (Ben-Yahuda, 1993, pp. 52-3). Equally effective at spreading fear, terror and political assassination differ in only one respect: “the target of a political assassination plot is a very specific individual. The target of terrorism is not.” Assassinations, like other terrorist events, may have massive consequences. For example, in the few weeks, following Martin Luther King’s “violent annihilation . . . in Memphis . . . it would seem that King’s death had been almost a personal enactment of the death of the nonviolent movement in America [and had] extinguished with him the nation’s highest moral adventure in recent history” (Frady, 2002, p. 206). Similarly, the 9-11 terror attack derailed the anti-globalization movement, substituting the “War on Terror” for the fight against exploitative international capitalism. Under the 2001 USA PATRIOT Act (Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism) invoked as a response to September 11 (but planned well beforehand), anti-globalization protest is now considered “a crime of domestic terror” (Chossudovsky, 2005, p. 9).

Inappropriate Left Response

Jean Baudrillard (2001) famously observed that September 11 rehearsed any number of Hollywood disaster scripts, combining, “the white magic of movies and the black magic of terrorism.” The French theorist may have originated the default left response to 9-11: “It is almost they who did it, but we who wanted it.” Accordingly, in the aftermath of the 7 July 2005 terror bombing of the London Underground, some progressive voices in the UK opined that that this was payback for UK involvement in the war against Iraq. However, as with September 11 and many other examples in the history of terrorism, the only purposes truly served by the bombings were those of the ruling party. And the unfortunate progressive response itself—by equating the Underground attacks with British participation in the US occupation of Iraq —strangely dovetailed with the claim that the left is on the side of terrorists.

The London 7/7 attacks provided a new legitimacy to those who had ordered the illegal invasion of Iraq. They contributed to significantly weakening the antiwar and civil rights movements, while triggering an atmosphere of fear and racial hatred across Britain and the European Union (Chossudovsky, 2005, p. 328).

The widespread reaction to 9-11 by established figures on the Anglo-American left, such as Noam Chomsky and his followers at Z Magazine and ZNet.org, suggests that the New York and Washington terror attacks were a predictable (if imprudent) reaction to US provocation. This view is also common among respected left scholars in the third world. Samir Amin (Amin, 2001, p. 20), for example, Director of the African Office at the Third World Forum in Dakar, Senegal, writes:

The instinctive horror any normal human being must feel at the sight of a massacre of large numbers of innocent people should not make us forget the role in this of U.S. po1icy and that of its G–7 allies . . . The American public needs to know that this is the reason why the attacks on the United States have not met with universal and unqualified opprobrium as it has been led to believe. The strategic choice of targets—New York’s financial center and the Pentagon—has even been applauded and not only by a handful of Islamic fanatics but by a large majority of public opinion in Africa and Asia and a sizeable sector of European opinion.

I argue that this establishment-left position—presented in an array of left-wing and liberal journals and websites, from Counterpunch to The Nation and from Socialist Register to The New Left Review is politically dubious and out of touch with the historical realities of terrorism. Machiavelli (1979b, p. 361) warned that successful assassinations are most often carried out from within the close circle of trusted advisers surrounding the murder target. “[F]or others, if they are not actually mad, cannot conspire, since weak men and men not close to the prince lack all hopes and opportunities which are required for the execution of a conspiracy.” The same is true, I believe, of successful terrorist conspiracies: convenient opportunities for maximum impact of terrorist events may be best known by, and available to those in power.

No hypotheses are put forward in this essay about the methods used to engineer 9-11, or the exact parties who conspired in its production. These likely will never be fully known, just as the famed Reichstag fire, seventy years later, remains shrouded in mystery (although we can imagine how, if transported back in time, the modern left would react to the disaster in Berlin: a bad thing done in a good cause). Instead I want to show how September 11 follows a typical pattern: a convenient terrorist event explained by the media in terms of widely shared stereotypical understandings, and then embellished and deepened by compliant intellectuals.


2. By Way of a Preface: The Left Response to September 11

In his careful analysis of the September 11 attacks, David Ray Griffin (Griffin 2004, p. xv-xvi) suggests that it is not surprising that the mainstream media have ignored questions about US government complicity; similarly, “it is not surprising that . . . right-wing and even middle-of-the-road commentators have not raised serious questions about the official account.” But Griffin wonders why, “America’s leftist critics of US policy, who are seldom worried about being called either unpatriotic or sacrilegious, have for the most part not explored, at least in public discourse, the possibility of official complicity.” Left commentators are aware of the perfect symmetry between pre-9-11 Bush administration plans for a greatly expanded military role for the United States, and the government’s revenge attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq that followed September 11. “These critics also know,” adds Griffin, “that the United States has many times in the past fabricated an ‘incident’ as a pretext for going to war—most notoriously for the wars against Mexico, Cuba, and Vietnam.” In place of official complicity, left commentators have embraced “a ‘coincidence theory’ according to which the attacks of 9/11 were, from the US government’s point of view, simply a godsend, which just happened to allow it to carry out its agenda.” Leftist critics have failed to raise questions about the September 11 terror attacks, even though proof of US involvement “would surely be the most effective way to undermine policies of the Bush administration to which they are so strongly opposed.”

The official story of September 11 features many doubtful circumstances that might be profitably explored by the left. Griffin and other 9-11 skeptics have identified striking anomalies in the White House story as painstakingly documented in The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, 2005). The essays in this book advance further evidence casting doubt on the Washington version. A mélange of contradictory facts might have offered a wonderful sub-plot for the Marx Brothers’ conspiracy thriller, Duck Soup (indeed some of these—such as the Bush/bin Laden family connection— are uproariously explored in Michael Moore’s landmark film, Fahrenheit 9/11): the US military’s redoubtable standard response procedures fail miserably as multiple hijacked passenger planes criss-cross American skies (Zarembka chapter). Fanatical Muslim hijackers, already suicided in New York and Washington, turn up alive and well in various parts of the Middle East (Kolar chapter). Mohammed Atta—crazed, sternly devout Muslim intent on teaching the West a lesson it will never forget—fortifies himself beforehand with alcohol, lap dancers and pork chops for dinner. He leaves his will and other self-incriminating evidence in two carry-on bags he apparently meant to take with him on his fiery journey to New York (Griffin, 2005, pp. 20-21). Passengers in plain sight of grim-faced hijackers armed with box-cutters make multiple cell phone calls at high altitudes that provide key details for 9-11—even though most of these calls could not have gone through, given existing cell phone technology (Chossudovsky, 2005, pp. 259-60). Airplane-proof buildings collapse seemingly on cue (Jones chapter), and none of the occupants survive, the stacked bodies warehoused in macabre showrooms, closed to the press. As if to mock Edward Said’s criticisms of Orientalism, a comic book Arab terrorist holed up in mountainous Afghanistan feeds the media with grainy videos about his faraway exploits in America.

In my view, there are several key reasons for left resistance to questioning the dubious official story of September 11. In the first place, the left—already anxious about its place in respectable dialogue on international affairs and national politics—fears stepping too far outside acknowledged boundaries of discourse, as these are defined and policed by academia, mass media, and the state. Second, commentators on the left are disposed to an idea of terrorism as the understandable reaction of underprivileged groups to oppression. Finally, the left is suspicious of conspiracy theories that cast elite groups as behind-the-scenes directors of sociopolitical events.

Maintaining Boundaries

“The conclusions [about US complicity in the attacks] are difficult to accept,” observes Michel Chossudovsky,

“because they point to the criminalization of the upper echelons of the State. They also confirm the complicity of the corporate media in upholding the legitimacy of the Administration’s war agenda and camouflaging US sponsored war crimes” (Chossudovsky, 2005, p. xxi).

Thanks to 9-11 and other terrorist incidents, including the July 2005 London Underground bombings, governments in the United States, the United Kingdom and elsewhere, have legislated extremely rigorous limits on dissent regarding the War on Terror. Not only aimed at suspected terrorists “through ethnic profiling,” these sanctions are also directed at human rights organizations and anti-war groups.

People can be arbitrarily arrested under the antiterrorist legislation and detained for an indefinite period. More generally, throughout the Western world, citizens are being tagged and labeled, their emails, telephone conversations and faxes are monitored and archived. Thousands of closed-circuit TV cameras, deployed in urban areas, are overseeing their movements. Detailed personal data is entered into giant Big Brother data banks. Once this cataloging has been completed, people will be locked into watertight compartments (Chossudovsky 2005, p. xix).

Government and media clampdown on discourse around September 11 likely has had some impact on the established left, given its legitimate desire for standing in national and international debates. But another factor may be more important. The left’s general view is that terrorism is a manifestation of discontent arising from oppression by the powerful. The Palestinian suicide campaign against the Israeli government, for example, fits this model.

Terrorism as the Result of Oppression

In the left version of 9-11 (generally following a scenario volunteered by Osama bin Laden), mayhem in New York and Washington was a result of America’s brutal globalization campaign that has marginalized the poor and disenfranchised of the earth. Thus, political analyst Michael Parenti (2002, p. 46), pointed out that bin Laden is a “rich, reactionary religious fanatic . . . [who] harnessed the legitimate grievances that people have felt regarding the conditions of their lives and directed them toward irrelevant foes.” In an article entitled “Globalization and September 11,” political sociologist Michael Mann (2001, p. 60) proffered a similar diagnosis. “September 11 revealed a . . . spectacular example of the use of the weapons of the weak. A dozen or so terrorists, armed with knives and civilian airliners, killed just over 3,000 people, demolished the twin towers of the World Trade Centre—just off Wall Street—and one of the Pentagon’s five sides: key symbols of US economic and military power.”

“Blowback” constitutes an elaboration on the left viewpoint, suggesting that September 11 erupted from the decades-long US sponsorship of jihadi fighters, in the struggle against the Former Soviet Union in Afghanistan that created al Qaeda. “The blowback has been quite direct,” avers Chomsky (2001, pp., 27, 61), “and of a kind very familiar from 50 years of history, including the drug flow and the violence.”

Ironically, the official Washington variant differs only in rhetorical stance: September 11 was a fanatical riposte to America’s crusade for freedom, a wildly successful gamble by vengeful Islam’s dark forces. The Washington version might have little trouble incorporating blowback: this was a case of unworthy Muslims biting the hand that fed them.

The establishment-left response to the destruction in New York and Washington reflects a conventional liberal and critical position on terrorist violence. From this perspective, violent acts against a dominant state are “an understandable response to oppression and exploitation, the last resort of the deprived and desperate” (Turk, 2004, p. 273). Leading liberal sociologist Charles Tilly (2003, pp. 235, 175)–who accepts the official position that “Muslim suicide squads crashed packed passenger jets into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center”—affirms that, “political actors most likely to employ extraordinary forms of threat and violence against their enemies come mostly from the excluded.”

Shut out by the corporate media and other mainstream sources of information, “[s]ympathetic accounts accepting terrorism as an understandable, perhaps even legitimate, form of defense and protest against oppression and threat are more likely to appear in radical, underground or non-Western communications” (Turk, 2004 p.). Mary Kaldor, for example, Director of the Centre for the Study of Global Governance at the London School of Economics, submits a view of September 11 held by other prominent British left-intellectuals on the Open Democracy Web site, including Tom Nairn, Susie Orbach and Stephen Lukes. She proposes September 11 resulted from “Regressive Globalisation”:

Related to the sense of insecurity is the encounter with globalisation, that is to say with growing interconnectedness, and the sense of impotence that arises when crucial decisions that affect every day life are taken at a further and further remove. The leaders of the team of young Saudis who committed suicide on 11 September 2001 were all educated in the west. This is typical of many religious militants, who are often migrants, either from countryside to town or from south to west, experiencing the loss of ties to their places of origin whilst not yet integrated into their new homes.

The left explanation of 9-11 terror as a response to globalization may be fundamentally misguided. I argue below that a socio-historical understanding of terrorism demands recognizing the close links of most forms of terrorism with state power. Terrorism is much less likely to be a manifestation of a revolt by, or on behalf of, the underprivileged than it is to be a demonstration of brute force by the state or its agents. Moreover, equating 9-11 terrorism with the impact of impersonal economic forces like globalization opens left commentators to the charge that they are excusing terrorism, and have no moral grasp of the enormity of terrorist liquidation of innocent lives (Bar-On and Goldstein, 2005, p. 238). Norman Geras, a Marxist professor and “darling of the Washington right wing for his outspoken support of the war in Iraq,” (Sunday Times, 2005 February 6) exploited this weakness following the 7/7 bombings in London.

Within hours of the bombs going off two weeks ago, the voices that one could have predicted began to make themselves heard with their root-causes explanations for the murder and maiming of a random group of tube and bus passengers in London. It was due to Blair, Iraq, illegal war and the rest of it . . . . It needs to be seen and said clearly: there are, among us, apologists for what the killers do. They make more difficult the fight to defeat them. The plea will be - it always is - that these are not apologists, they are merely honest Joes and Joanies endeavouring to understand the world in which we live. What could be wrong with that? What indeed? Nothing is wrong with genuine efforts at understanding; on these we all depend. But the genuine article is one thing, and root-causes advocacy seeking to dissipate responsibility for atrocity, mass murder, crime against humanity, especially in the immediate aftermath of their occurrence, is something else (Geras, 2005).

Rejecting Conspiracy Theory

Left resistance to alternative explanations of 9-11 reflects a general antipathy to conspiracy theory even though the official story itself relies on a very elaborate web of conspiracy, involving bin Laden and many others (Griffin 2005, p. 5; Pratt, 2003, p. 255). This may explain why the editors of the respected left journal Monthly Review signaled soon after the tragedies in New York and Washington that independent investigation of the actual events was off-limits.

There is little we can say directly about the September 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.—except that these were acts of utter, inhuman violence, indefensible in every sense, taking a deep and lasting human toll (Magdoff and Foster, 2001, p. 1).

The left favours structural explanations of political and social events, with capacious categories such as social class, globalization, international relations and so forth brought to bear on social phenomena, including terrorism. Oppositional theory which takes dialectical approach to social relations emphasizes (along with structural factors) elite agency: the actions of powerful leaders and organizations with more control over critical events that directly affect our own lives than many leftwing analysts are prepared to accept. Moreover, elites operate within a deep political structure (discussed below) that is an unacknowledged part of the network of political power analyzed by the left.

Commentators on the left, like pundits elsewhere on the political spectrum, are hesitant to go far astray of the limits on accepted discourse regarding controversial questions, especially, as in the case of 9-11, when corporate media and the state heavily police these boundaries. There is a left bias towards explanations of terror as the result of exploitation and revolt of the underprivileged. Finally, the left is averse to conspiracy theories spun by critics of the system, seeing such theories as antithetical to systematic analysis based on larger factors, like class struggle or globalization.

Leftist failure to consider official complicity in the events of September 11 may also arise from a common misapprehension of the historical roots of terror. Most commentators regardless of political stripe regard “terrorism . . . as a non- or extra-state menace, rather than as state violence.” However, this perspective ignores “the possibility that the excessive violence of the state might itself, in certain instances, constitute a form of terrorist violence” (Bar-On and Goldstein, 2005, p. )

Sources of Terror

It is useful to look at the main sources of political assassination and terrorist events. Organized groups from the periphery standing in opposition to the state constitute one source of terror. These groups wish to seize power from the centre, and replace it with their own system of government. Terror may also result from two or more contesting “symbolic-moral universes, ” (Ben-Yahuda, 1993, p. 15)—as in the dichotomy posited by the official Washington explanation of 9-11: a clash between freedom-loving America projected by President Bush, and Osama bin Laden’s thwarted Muslim world. Powerful individuals at the centre of the state constitute another—though less commonly recognized—source of terror. This form of terror is carried out by the state and perpetrated within the state itself.

Left explanations of September 11 typically involve variations on the first and second sources of terrorist violence: the attacks on New York and Washington were a blow from the oppressed periphery against the heart of empire, an explosive, if unwise, response from the radical Muslim universe against that of American-led globalization. But this ignores the third, most virulent source of terror, the state.


3. Taxonomy of Terrorism

I want to suggest that the September 11 terror attacks are most likely an example of the third source of terror, an attack from within ordered by those at the centre of the state.

First Source of Terror: Organized Groups from the Periphery

Most theories of terrorism frame political violence “as being restricted to non-state actors who unlawfully (from the perspective of Western countries) challenge some aspect of the status quo” (Bar-On and Goldstein, 2005, p. 227-28). Such theories normally deal with the first source of terror discussed above—attacks from the periphery directed at the centre.

Conventional notions of terrorism include Domestic Terrorism, violent symbolic acts, usually aimed at government (though these could also target individuals or non-governmental organizations) carried out by autonomous individuals or groups with a grievance, real or contrived. “It is this meaning of terrorism that today is what most people think of when they hear the term terrorism, especially in the light of the spectacular events of 9/11” (Bar-On and Goldstein, 2005, p. 42). Aijaz Ahmed (2004, p. 47), for example, discusses terror from “the peripheries of the capitalist system,” which now involve

the ideologies of the Hindu far right in India, the sundry fundamentalisms of Islamic mullahs, or the millenarian ideologies of those who brought us September 11th. Terrorism is now where national liberation used to be, and the US today chases these handful of terrorists as assiduously and globally as it used to chase phalanxes of revolutionaries until not long ago.


The terror campaign led by British suffragists in the early twentieth century, which involved among other events, the 1913 mutilation of rare orchids in London’s Kew Gardens, falls short of our definition, since there were no civilian casualties, but it nevertheless gives a most interesting example of domestic terrorism aimed at patriarchal and imperialist symbols. Terrorism by the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ) which began with bombing neighbourhood mailboxes in English-speaking areas of Montreal is another instance (mailboxes of the period displayed the British crown, a provocative symbol in Quebec). This early 1960s political movement advocated violence to liberate the francophone province of Quebec from the rest of Canada, and constructed a model later imitated by the IRA in Northern Ireland, and other terrorist groups. But, as we shall see later, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) may have covertly influenced FLQ violence, as it accelerated into kidnapping and murder. The Red Brigade terror in Italy displays another example of domestic terrorism. However, doubts have been raised as to whether the Red Brigade wasn’t actually acting for rightwing elements within the Italian state (Bar-0n and Goldstein, 2005, p. 229).

Terrorist acts against occupying powers—such as IRA violence against the British, or militant fury visited upon America and its allies in 21st century Iraq—are perhaps the most readily understandable instance of political violence. This mode of terrorism aims at “the creation of an independent homeland based on shared religious, ethnic or linguistic ties” (Bar-On and Goldstein, 2005, p. 228). Of course, as in most instances of non-state terrorism, the arms required for domestic terrorist acts are often provided, at great profit, by powerful states.

Second Source of Terror: Conflicting Symbolic-Moral Systems

Intra-civil society terrorism or what Nigerian activist Edwin Madunagu (2002) calls “communal or inter-ethnic ‘clashes’” took many lives during the 1990s, including the Rwandan genocide. “One of the twentieth century’s most effective terrorist forces,” observes Charles Tilly (2003, p. 175), “was the Apartheid regime’s South African Defense Force (SADF) which long deployed intimidation against people—both black and white whom it had identified as opposed to the regime.” White America’s century-long lynch law terror against African Americans, which featured for decades the highly popular exchange of lurid postcards of lynching victims in the US mail, must rank high among history’s most grotesque episodes of inter-ethnic brutality (Allen, Als, Lewis, & Litwack, 2000). Hitler’s genocide against the Jews, Slavs, gays and gypsies constitutes a horrific example of terror arising from conflicting symbolic-moral systems (Ben Yahuda, 1993, p. 15). The terror war against aboriginal peoples in North American, Australia and New Zealand offers another instance of intra-civil society terrorism. Although Canadians “pride themselves with living in a peaceful society that places a high premium on human rights,” (Bar-On and Goldstein, 2005, p. 234), Canada has a history of malevolence towards aboriginal peoples. In 1995, an Ontario Provincial Police sharpshooter murdered an unarmed protester named Dudley George during a First Nations occupation of Ipperwash Provincial Park, built over a native burial ground. The newly elected Conservative provincial government of Mike Harris encouraged, and then covered up the incident, which also involved brutal beatings of First Nations protesters by police (Edwards, 2003).

A less-recognized but very prevalent mode of terror based on conflicting total social systems is Military-state terrorism: “warfare deliberately waged against civilians with the purpose of destroying their will to support either leaders or policies that the agents of such violence find objectionable” (Carr, 2002, p. 6). Military historian Caleb Carr suggests this may be the oldest form of terrorism. Rome provided the model for most modern permutations of state terrorism, exhibiting a genius for destructive war against defenseless populations. In the Second World War and since, British and American state terrorism has far surpassed anything the Romans achieved in bloodletting of innocents. The incendiary effects of September 11, as terrible as they were, do not bear comparison with zealous American firebombing of virtually every urban conglomeration in Japan, or allied airpower’s fanatical destruction of hundreds of German cities and towns (Markusen and Kopf, 1995; Sebald, 2003). Japan’s infamous Rape of Nanking—when Japanese soldiers raped and chopped up helpless civilians, day after day—took a third of a million Chinese lives. Tilly (2002) estimates that “about 100 million people died in the twentieth century as a direct result of action by organized military units backed by one government or another. A comparable number of civilians likely died of war-induced disease and other indirect effects.”

Third Source of Terror: Political Violence from the Centre Directed Within (i)

The state may be the primary source of terror inflicted on its own citizens. As opposed to intra-civil society terrorism (which may be led by the state, as in Hitler’s genocide), this form of terror is based primarily on ideological as opposed to ethnic or cultural reasons. Indeed, the first use of the concepts of terror and terrorism is associated with the French government under Robespierre, which unleashed a horrendous campaign of State domestic terrorism, including “mass executions of suspected traitors of the French Revolution, from monarchists loyal to the ancien regime to those who questioned the policies of the new regime. This bloody period of French history has come to be known as the Reign of Terror” (Bar-On and Goldstein, 2005, p. 227). Apart from Robespierre, state-sanctioned murder is hardly novel, stretching from Stalin’s purges to Pol Pot’s elimination of teachers and other knowledge workers. More recent versions of state domestic terrorism include Russian overkill in the Chechen occupation at Beslan, or the ATF/FBI massacre of Branch Davidians, mostly children and women, at Waco, Texas. The United States government’s 1950s Red Scare against citizens suspected of being communists also qualifies as domestic state terrorism. McCarthyism’s record of murderous violence was modest: the public burning of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, a “handful of suicides,” and some high profile fatal heart attacks (Schrecker, 1998, p. 361); but its most barbaric achievement was to frighten and traumatize the American nation, wrecking Hollywood and decimating public education and the academy.

The bombing of the Presidential Palace in Santiago, Chile on Tuesday, September 11, 1973 began a campaign of state terror “synonymous with the some of the worst brutality of [the twentieth] century” in a country with “a rich cultural and political tradition” (Sagaris 1996, p. xxi, 7). Following the overthrow and murder of Chile’s President, Salvadore Allende—whose official funeral was delayed for seventeen years—the brutal, U.S.-supported regime of Augusto Pinochet executed or “disappeared” thousands of citizens, and subjected the nation to a sustained period of agony, where secret torture, rape and execution were commonplace. “The repercussions of the coup are still felt today and Chile, generally speaking, has not confronted its past” (Aguilera and Fredes, 2003, p. x). In the days following the coup, the regime imprisoned five thousand citizens in Santiago’s National Stadium, a soccer venue turned into a “house of horrors” (Chavkin, 1982, pp. 141, 148). The Swedish ambassador to Chile, Harald Edelstam, visited the Stadium in an attempt to rescue captured Swedish nationals and Chilean citizens and witnessed desolate scenes that Pinochet’s evil regime would repeat many times over for almost two decades.

Busloads of newly arrested people were jostled into the stadium by rifle
butts. Other groups were shoved out into trucks to begin the trip to remote concentration camps—Dawson Island near the Antarctic, or an isolated outpost in the Andean highlands. Unable to help Edelstam watched, horrified, as hundreds of people were “processed” each day. He became even more horrified when he learned of the tortures that went on in the subterranean passages of the stadium. By now it was an open secret that many prisoners were hooked up with electronic gadgetry through which electric shocks were administered to the nostrils, nipples, or genitalia. Others were mowed down by machine guns, individually or in groups. This had become a daily occurrence.

State domestic terrorism may flow beyond national borders. Stalin’s deadly purges, for example, included the execution of Trotsky, his family and many of his followers while they were living outside the Soviet Union. Operation Condor, through which Argentina, Chile and several other Latin American countries extended their domestic campaign of torture and assassination into Europe extends another instance of state domestic terrorism perpetrated on an international scale (Dinges, 2004). The French government “bombed the Greenpeace ship in New Zealand, killing a Portuguese photographer . . . [because it] apparently had not wanted environmental groups to interfere with its nuclear test policy in the South Pacific” (Bar-On and Goldstein, 2005, p. 233.)

In the final decade of the Cold War, the US used the concept of state-sponsored terrorism. “Bulgaria, East Germany, Libya, North Korea, and Syria were named as Soviet-controlled sponsors of anti-American terrorism” (Turk, 2004, p.). But the term applies also to terrorism sponsored by the United States, or other powers. Thus, the United States funded and directed political violence by the Contras in Nicaraugua (Bar-On and Goldstein, 2005, p. 232). Even military state terror by subordinate nations against their rivals may be guided and controlled by hegemonic states.

Most forms of terrorism are inherently vulnerable to manipulation by powerful states. “Authority,” noted C. Wright Mills (1959, p. 316), “is power that is explicit and more or less ‘voluntarily’ obeyed; manipulation is the ‘secret’ exercise of power, unknown to those who are influenced.” Much IRA violence, for example, may have been instigated by British security forces with the broad aim of perpetuating disorder in Northern Ireland (Sunday Herald, 2004). Similarly, the United States and its proxies, the jihadis fighting with the Bosnian Muslim army against the Armed Forces of the Yugoslavian Federation, contributed a great deal to the breakup of Yugoslavia (Chossudovsky, 2005, p 40). What Peter Dale Scott (2005) notices about “two kinds of businesses” is true for states also.

There are two kinds of businesses:
those which flourish from peace
and the strengthening of law
and those which require the opposite

Just as powerful governments are a likely source of much political violence, they also successfully influence the public toward certain views on terrorism. The United States government actively discourages use of the term terrorism to describe not only its own murderous actions, but also domestic terrorist acts, such as abortion clinic bombings and assassinations of physicians who provide reproductive health care (Turk, 2004). Relations between Japan and China have been damaged by Japan’s failure to admit its terrorist role in the Rape of Nanking. Similarly, the United Kingdom and the United States have successfully obscured the terrible human cost of strategic bombing in Germany and the firebombing of Japan. In the case of nuclear terror inflicted on Hiroshima, “it is no coincidence that [during the fiftieth anniversary of the nuclear strike] U. S. military authorities strenuously censored reporting of the bombing, especially reporting that foregrounded the suffering of Japanese bodies” (Gusterson, 2004, p. 79).

4. Machiavellian State Terrorism and Deep Politics

Third Source of Terror: Political Violence from the Centre Directed Within (ii)

September 11, 2001 likely belongs to a long history of terrorist attacks and assassinations secretly ordered by powerful individuals at the centre of the state in order to destroy domestic opposition, or to make possible and/or justify already planned government policy. I call this Machiavellian state terrorism. This form of state terror differs from those surveyed above in two respects. It is secretly and deliberately confected to provide an excuse for achieving certain state objectives; and it is designed to implicate a particular group or individual other than the real perpetrators. Although the U.S.-inspired Pinochet coup in Chile conforms somewhat to this definition, given its initial secrecy and covert methods (Haslam, 2005), the Chilean dictatorship—relying on support from elites and a significant proportion of Chilean citizens—openly acknowledged that it was the source of terror visited upon opponents of the regime.

By contrast, secrecy is paramount in Machiavellian state terrorism. Much evidence indicates, for example, that Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, which severely damaged the U.S. civil rights movement, was a government hit, successfully disguised as the action of a deranged white racist acting alone (Pepper, 2003). Similarly, Stalin probably ordered the assassination of Kirov, leading member of the Soviet politburo and a possible competitor. Stalin used the December 1934 murder as an excuse to unleash the purges against his erstwhile Bolshevik comrades (Knight, 1999). Almost two years earlier, in February 1933, Hitler took advantage of the Reichstag Fire, which the Nazis started themselves, to promulgate the first exceptional laws against German civil rights.

Using this internally manufactured act of terror, the Nazis passed a series of bills limiting civil liberties, and so managed to scare the population as to score . . . a narrow electoral victory. Thereafter, on the strength of this emergency legislation, they annihilated the Leftist opposition in a few months (Preparata, 2005, p. 203).

Although a frequent occurrence in history, Machiavellian state terrorism is the most difficult to recognize and accept because it involves those “invested with power and legitimacy . . . [who] are, supposedly, the guardians of the symbolic moral universe and its boundaries” (Ben-Yahuda, 1993, p. 15). In Machiavellian state terrorism, the “guardians . . . abuse their power and twist and mock their moral obligations, committing despised and harmful acts.”

I use the term Machiavellian state terrorism to differentiate it from other forms of terrorism connected with government. To summarize, Machiavellian state terrorism is terror/assassination performed for reasons different from the publicized ones; often initiated by persons or groups other than those suspected of the act; and—most important—secretly perpetrated by, or on behalf, of the violated state itself.

Machiavellian state terrorism may be the most common terrorist variant since it occurs in times of peace as well as war and is funded by agencies with deep pockets, rich technical expertise, and limitless connections. It may manifest itself in surprising ways: the bungled 1887 “Jubilee Plot”: an attempt on the life of Queen Victoria by Fenians run by the British government (Campbell, 2002); deliberate spread of lies by agents of the Belgian state in the Congo about rape and murder of Belgian nationals as part of a plan to topple Patrice Lumumba (De Witt, 2001). Machiavellian state terrorism may embrace other facets of terrorism: government officials planned and triggered intra-civil society massacre in Rwanda.

Machiavellian state terrorism forms part of the system of deep politics analyzed in an earlier piece in Research in Political Economy (MacGregor 2002). Deep politics concerns political phenomena that are unacknowledged or repressed in ordinary discourse. The deep political system brings together—along with the criminal underworld (Woodiwiss, 2001, p. 388) and covert government operations—the power elite discussed by C. Wright Mills (1959): great wealthy families, corporate leaders, government officials, top political figures, and the military. As with any social system, deep political phenomena are characterized by regularities and hierarchies, identifiable organizations and cultural and symbolic meanings.

Rarely studied in academia, and barely mentioned in mainstream news media, deep politics is integral to the American social imaginary, informing rap music, for example, and other types of protest art. “Why did Bush knock down the towers?” wondered Jadakiss in the best-selling 2004 rap album Kiss of Death. Rapper Immortal Technique, born in a Peruvian military hospital and paroled in New York State from a sentence for violent assault in 1999, extends perhaps the most ominous critique in “Cause of Death”:

My words'll expose George Bush and Bin Laden
As two separate parts of the same seven headed dragon
And you can't fathom the truth
so you don't hear me
_You think illuminati's just a fuckin conspiracy theory?_
That's why Conservative racists are all runnin' shit_
And your phone is tapped by the Federal Government_.

Most of us are already familiar with deep politics as an unacknowledged cinematic subject. The repressed finds an outlet in Hollywood’s dream life (Pratt, 2001). Cary Grant framed for murder in the terrifying upside-down world of North By Northwest might have been an older, nattier, luckier Lee Harvey Oswald. America invented the assassination preview: Suddenly, The Man Who Knew Too Much, or The Manchurian Candidate stand as improbable dress rehearsals for the murderous cinematic production in Dealey Plaza that showed—as a review in Critical Criminology (MacDonald, 2005, p. 240) puts it—how “a conspiracy involving multiple riflemen killed President Kennedy.” Mr. Zapruder’s shocking outtake returned the favor, launching—as convincingly argued by David Lubin (2003) in Shooting Kennedy –an entirely new and violent vision in American movies. This vision featured ever more explicit encounters with a deep political universe, as in Winter Kills, Executive Action, The Parallax View (which dealt with political assassinations) or The Godfather trilogy and Scarface (links between politics, business, and organized crime). Oliver Stone may be the most influential deep politics filmmaker, constructing film narratives (such as JFK) “compellingly evocative of and appropriate to his time, in all his aesthetic excesses, conspiratorial tendencies and public audacity” (Sturken 1997, p. 64).

Numerous disaster movies, and conspiracy thrillers like Arlington Road, which concluded with a massive terrorist bombing in Washington, primed the American collective unconscious for 9-11. A BBC (2002) documentary indicated that “Hollywood had researched scenarios such as hijacks, bombs in New York, manhunts for Muslim extremists and even the use of planes as guided missiles aimed at Washington . . . Intensive research gave movie makers uncanny insight into terrorist methods and psychology.” Writing in New Left Review Mike Davis (2001, pp. 37-38) observes that

[T]he attacks on New York and Washington DC were organized as epic horror cinema with meticulous attention to mise en scène. Indeed, the hijacked planes were aimed to impact precisely at the vulnerable border between fantasy and reality . . . George W. Bush, who has a bigger studio, meanwhile responds to Osama bin Laden, as one auteur to another, with his own fiery wide-angle hyperboles.

Deep politics may lend itself to moviemaking because of cinema’s anxious focus on good and evil: the Manichean frame plays as well on the screen as it does in Presidential press conferences. To this extent, Baudrillard (2002) is correct: knowledge of evil is mostly repressed and denied in the West. “Evil . . . can’t be subdued by any form of rationality. This is the illusion of the West: because technological perfection seems within reach, one believes by extension in the possibility of realizing moral perfection, in a future free of contingencies in the best of all possible worlds.” Machiavellian state terrorism, and other forms of politically inspired malevolence, belong to a wider category I have called, the political economy of concrete evil: the systematic study of outbreaks of evil in history.




5. Genealogy of Machiavellian state terrorism

A sympathetic student of Machiavelli, G.W.F. Hegel (1995, p. 212) drew attention to police manipulation of innocent parties in his lectures on political theory. Hegel wanted to identify the socio-historical conditions of “concrete evil”—the intermittent, sudden, and transitory appearance of large-scale human malevolence. In his Heidelberg lectures on the Philosophy of Right of 1817/18—not published until almost 170 years after his death—Hegel offered a frank discussion of corrupt police power. Law officers are necessary to prevent the occurrence of evil amidst “all the thrust and bustle of civil society.” However, Hegel worried that the modern state encouraged in the police “a disposition to be false and do all they can to catch someone.” The result could be an alliance of police with the underworld, and a propensity to incite criminal acts, or falsify crimes against the state. Hegel refers to police spies in London who tricked three Irish day labourers into taking part in a counterfeit money operation, and then turned these unfortunates over to the authorities to collect a bounty. Such degenerate practices, he warned, “can give rise to the abyss of depravity.”

Hegel’s example of corrupt police power resembles Tilly’s (1986, p. 171; Arrighi, 2005, p. 109) notion of a state protection racket. States maintain a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence through their claim to protect citizens from criminals or against external enemies. However, states often follow practices made familiar by organized crime’s protection rackets, where the racketeer “creates a threat and then charges for its reduction.” From this perspective,

[g]overnment’s provision of protection . . . often qualifies as racketeering. To the extent that the threats against which a given government protects its citizens are imaginary or are consequences of its own activities, the government has organized a protection racket. Since governments themselves commonly simulate, stimulate, or even fabricate threats of external war and since the repressive and extractive activities of governments often constitute the largest current threats to the livelihoods of their own citizens, many governments act in essentially the same ways as racketeers. There is, of course, a difference: racketeers, by the conventional definition, operate without the sanctity of government.

In the early development of the modern state, Tilly observes, terror played an important role. States cemented their power by commissioning brigands to attack rivals; they encouraged their own soldiers to provide for themselves through plunder and rape of civilians. Similarly, Linebaugh and Rediker (2001) document in The Many-Headed Hydra, their study of the rise of the British Transatlantic empire, how governments secretly used domestic terror, or the threat of terror, to discipline and divide citizens, and to maintain absolute state power.

How do rulers achieve and retain authority when they actively engage in terror? Tilly (1986, p. 171) argues that power-holders seek assent not from those over whom power is wielded, but from other power-holders.

Legitimacy is the probability that other authorities will act to confirm the decisions of a given authority. Other authorities, I would add, are much more likely to confirm the decisions of a challenged authority that controls substantial force; not only fear of retaliation, but also desire to maintain a stable environment recommend that general rule.

In other words, Machiavellian state terrorism depends on the acquiescence of rival power holders, who have the means for revealing the truth but choose not to do so. Accordingly, powerful men in the Kremlin like Bukharin, who suspected Stalin’s complicity in the murder of Kirov, opted for silence. They did so in part because this revelation would cause conflict that “would bring the system crashing down . . . They had helped to build the cult of Stalin, upon which the edifice of the state rested, and they would have thrown the entire regime into jeopardy if they had questioned the official version of what happened to Kirov” (Knight, 1999, pp. 267-68). This sort of reluctance may account for the glaring absences and distortions in the 1964 Warren Report that confirmed Oswald as the lone shooter in Dealey Plaza. It certainly may have some bearing on the status of The 911 Commission Report, which reveals despite its manifest intentions, evidence of a cover-up at the highest level (Griffin, 2005, p. 291).

6. “Intoxication” and Left Reaction to September 11

Assassination is technically quite demanding, for, at least in a democracy, it must be convincingly disguised as a suicide, accident, fatal illness, crime of passion or, most elegant of all, a “settling of accounts” (McLoughlin, 1998, p. 209).


Among highly developed capitalist democracies, Canada may have the most enviable reputation for probity and honest dealing. However, the terror campaign of the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ) which began in the early 1960s and concluded almost a decade later involved deception and terrorist violence by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police that sparked two official inquiries in 1977. The Mounties engineered the second, federal inquiry to limit damage that might have been caused by the original, Quebec government investigation. Authorities suppressed the first volume of the massive federal McDonald Commission report; it has not yet been released to the public. Nevertheless, the Canadian media dug up disturbing evidence of RCMP brutality disguised as instances of FLQ violence, or what I have called, Machiavellian state terrorism.

Almost two decades later an independent investigator uncovered documents showing the RCMP had executed in 1971 a prominent FLQ member named Mario Bachand in Paris, France. This state execution contained, in miniature, some elements suggestive of September 11, including the creation of non-existent terrorist groups and intense manipulation of the mass media. It is likely after all that the imagination and resources of intelligence services are circumscribed—like those of any other organization—by history and personal experience.

The FLQ, Intoxication, and September 11

On March 29, 1971 two RCMP operatives—a man and a woman posing as Canadian journalists—shot Mario Bachand, a prominent 27 year-old FLQ member, in his friend’s Paris apartment (McLoughlin 1998). The RCMP may have targeted Bachand to inform the FLQ that the game was over. Indeed, following his assassination there were no further FLQ operations. Canadian secret police prepared carefully for the Paris shooting, putting out false news stories about an FLQ rift that centered on Bachand months before agents shot him three times in the head with a silencer-equipped .22 pistol. The few scattered remnants of the Quebecois terrorist group likely realized Bachand’s death was a state execution. But left-wing independantistes in Quebec (who shared the FLQ’s aim of a sovereign Quebec, if not its methods) never questioned the official story—the alternative, that Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s government brutally murdered a Canadian citizen overseas was not even considered.

Bachand’s death is important for my argument because it provides a fully documented account of a modern secret service assassination/terrorist operation in a Western democracy. (Another thoroughly investigated instance is the assassination of Martin Luther King [Pepper, 2003] but King’s murder—unlike Bachand’s—does not appear to have involved the deliberate creation of terror groups by government.) The success of the Bachand murder plot depended on what French special services call, “intoxication”—“the cloud of disinformation” that surrounds assassinations and other terrorist events carried out by state security agencies (McLoughlin, 1998, pp. 243, 245). Initial reports (covertly produced by the Canadian embassy in Paris) said that “a mysterious young Canadian” had been found beaten to death in his apartment. Although the body had not been identified, said the press releases, it was likely that of Mario Bachand, an FLQ militant who had made sworn enemies with his revolutionary colleagues. “The cover story—that the FLQ had killed Bachand—appeared almost immediately . . . Once the mind has accepted one explanation, it will resist others that are more troublesome.” The imprecision and implied mystery of the first reports encouraged readers to accept what they were given.

Reported cell phone calls from Muslim-guided aircraft veering toward New York and Washington apparently provided most of the initial explanation for what happened on September 11. That some of the 19 hijackers were actually alive and living somewhere in the Middle East, combined with other incongruous elements revealed later, added to the mystery of September 11. But the cover story was firmly established before the end of that eventful day. Box-cutter wielding Arab fanatics with a murderous grudge against the West flew packed, heavily jet-fuel laden passenger planes into symbol-charged targets with terrible, almost unforeseen results. It was a story the left would grow to accept as its own. Tariq Ali (2002a), writing in The New Left Review, provided a template.

The complacency of this world was severely shaken by the events of 11 September. What took place—a carefully planned terrorist assault on the symbols of US military and economic power—was a breach in the security of the North American mainland, an event neither feared nor imagined by those who devise war-games for the Pentagon. The psychological blow was unprecedented. The subjects of the Empire had struck back.

The left seemed unconcerned that, apart from bin Laden’s cartoon-like videos and some other forms of intoxication surrounding September 11 (such as al Jazeera’s “independent” newscasts ), official government sources provided most of the hard details on the destruction of the World Trade Center and the attack on the Pentagon, including identities of the supposed hijackers retrieved from the wreckage of the Twin Towers. This pattern would reappear in London in July 2005 when police somehow managed to rescue from smoldering ruins in the destroyed Underground tunnel drivers’ licenses and other material proving culpability of four young men, three of whom were Pakistani (Chossudovsky, 2005, p. 329).

When Mario Bachand sat down for lunch with two RCMP assassins a cover story for his murder had already been prepared. The same is true for the crazed flights that hit the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. “The 1993 World Trade Centre bombing,” writes Peter Bergen, “looks increasingly like a dress rehearsal for al-Qaeda’s devastating attacks on the Twin Towers eight years later.” The elaborate RCMP cover story for Mario Bachand’s extermination contained some items familiar from 9-11 including an extremist Middle Eastern backdrop. In a few short months the RCMP gave birth to two separate, fictional terrorist groups based in exotic climes that would spawn a media frenzy in Canada. The RCMP operation illustrated two important aspects of U.S. intelligence actions surrounding September 11: “The US intelligence apparatus has created its own terrorist organizations. And at the same time, it creates its own terrorist warnings concerning the terrorist organizations which it has itself created” (Chossudovsky, 2005, p. 151)

Less than a year before Bachand’s assassination, a Radio-Canada reporter “accidentally” discovered two disguised FLQ militants taking lessons in what they called, “selective assassination” in a remote Palestinian guerilla training camp (McLoughlin, 1998, p. 183-186, 199-2020). Televised images broadcast across the globe showed “Sélim” and “Salem,” their faces obscured by keffiyehs, the Palestinian headgear favoured by Yassar Arafat. The two men revealed plans to return to Canada and kill high-level officials and others opposed to Quebec’s independence. In January 1971, six months after the impromptu desert meeting United Press International received an envelope containing a photograph of men in Palestinian scarves and carrying weapons. They looked a lot like “Sélim” and “Salem.” The package also contained a “communiqué from the Armée de liberation du Quebec (ALQ)” which promised to fight “for the liberation of the Quebec people, so long oppressed by the false cures of capitalism.” The communiqué, which received enormous publicity, concluded:

The ALQ is the military wing of the FLQ, like Assifah and Fatha. We claim responsibility for the action last year against the home of Drapeau “the dog” [the mayor of Montreal, whose home was bombed by the FLQ]. Throughout the world where there are struggles for popular liberation, our soldiers are in training: Angola, Cuba, the Middle East, Algeria, and soon Peking. See the photo of the training camp at Souf, Javash, in Jordan [in which a man holds a rocket-propelled grenade over his shoulder].

Courage, prisoner comrades and your families!
Victory! ALQ Central Committee

Along with their ALQ communiqué, “Sélim” and “Salem” would create in Algiers an FLQ offshoot called the Délégation extérieure du FLQ (DEFLQ). “The Algerian government supported the group with a subsidy of approximately 2,000 francs a month.” In December 1970, about three months before Bachand’s death, the DEFLQ released in Algiers a Bulletin condemning “a self-proclaimed General Secretary of the FLQ. This self-proclaimed pseudo-marxist Secretary General is among those who promote among socialist ranks the petit-bourgeois ideology of working-class submission to American power.” Of course, “Sélim” and “Salem” were RCMP operatives; the DEFLQ was a secret service invention; and the detested “self-proclaimed General Secretary” was Mario Bachand.

Although primitive by today’s standards, the RCMP’s murder operation involved feeding the press with countless items about FLQ activities overseas and fueling controversy about its nefarious program of assassination. Strangely, some well-known political commentators who spread the stories had an earlier background with the FLQ. These elements are familiar also in relation to September 11.

To sustain “the War on Terrorism” agenda . . . fabricated realities, funneled on a day to day basis into the news chain, must become indelible truths which form part of a broad political and media consensus . . . The most powerful component rests with the CIA, which secretly subsidizes authors, journalists and media critics, though a web of private foundations and CIA sponsored front organizations (Chossudovsky, 2005, p. 153).

Now largely forgotten, the FLQ made plenty of world headlines in the 1960s and early 1970s. The New Left Review, for example, then an international bellwether of the radical left, featured an interview with high-ranking FLQ militant Charles Gagnon (1970) in its November/December 1970 issue. Gagnon, who had bombed a shoe factory in 1966 killing a female office worker and severely injuring several others, spoke of an FLQ alliance with the Black Panthers. But the bloom quickly faded. London-based Mary Kaldor’s (2003) brief account in the Open Democracy Web site of late twentieth century terrorism is symptomatic: she leaps from the French troubles in Algeria of the 1950s and early 1960s to the IRA uprising after Bloody Sunday, leaving the glory years of the FLQ (1963-1971) unmentioned. (When I entered the London School of Economics fresh from home-town Ottawa in 1975 the FLQ was well-known in Britain, four years after it had ceased operations). No doubt the script prepared by the RCMP (the CIA lent a hand) for Bachand’s execution was overly intricate. Recently released documents suggest the Trudeau government exaggerated the FLQ threat (Ottawa Citizen 2001). Will the same be said someday of bin Laden and Al-Qaeda?

The phony desert meeting with RCMP operatives disguised as FLQ militants schooled in deadly Palestinian guerilla techniques provided fuel for months of Canadian television and press commentary critical of the FLQ, and aroused much interest elsewhere in the world. The stage was set for Bachand’s termination and the final destruction of the FLQ. Similarly, revamped cold-war intellectual Samuel Huntington and his best-selling The Clash of Civilizations may have contributed more than anyone else to intoxication around September 11 (Chossudovsky, 2005, p. 194)—Huntington’s prophetic book even included Muslim fanatics who wear jeans, sip coke, and blow up passenger planes.

Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations

“The public reception of The Clash of Civilizations has been akin to that of some Hollywood blockbusters: panned by the critics but a box office success,” marveled Gusterson (2004, p. 125). Huntington’s book wasn’t the only one to foresee critical aspects of September 11. Many 9-11 skeptics noted Zbigniew Brzezinski’s remarks in The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives (1997), where he indicated that a deep trauma, such as the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, would be necessary to awaken America to its geostrategic destiny in Eurasia and Central Asia. “Brzezinski’s book, authored by a former national security advisor,” observes David Ray Griffin, “cannot be considered simply one book among hundreds offering advice to the government . . . three years after Brzezinski’s apparent wish for a Pearl Harbor-type event was published . . . the Project for a New American Century [an influential right-wing think tank] would contain a similar passage.”

Though influential in higher policy circles, Brzezinski’s volume did not have the popular impact of Huntington’s controversial Clash of Civilizations, which set the tone for much discussion of Islam in the United States. “We cannot be sure,” remarked Hugh Gusterson (2004, p. 125), “why Huntington’s book sold so many copies and provoked such animated debate in the West.” First published as an article in Foreign Affairs in 1993 and released as a book in 1996, Clash of Civilizations adopts a “crude cultural determinism” that highlights three civilizations (there are seven civilizations in total, according to Huntington) with “potential for combustible interactions between them”: the Sinic (Chinese), Islamic and Western civilizations. A dynamic civilization with profound commitment to “Enlightenment values of rationality and human rights,” the West may be in decline as its population growth slows, “crime and drug abuse rates rise, the family erodes, and the Protestant work ethic weakens.” Huntington worried that

the West’s liberal concern to promote human rights and democracy throughout the world and its tendency to see Enlightenment values as universal rather than simply Western will drag it into conflicts with other civilizations in which it will lack the economic, political, and military power to prevail (Gusterson, 2004, p. 123).

While his book leaves Israel almost unmentioned, Huntington evokes a pugnacious Islam, founded on universalist values but without a central core state that would hold it together. “He suggests that, given the insistent drumbeat of Islamic-sponsored terrorist attacks on American embassies, airliners, and military facilities, the United States has since the Iranian revolution been in a ‘quasi war’ with Islamic civilization (Guunderson 2004, pp. 123-24).” Don’t take Americanization for genuine adoption of Western values, warns Huntington, in a curiously prescient passage. “Somewhere in the Middle East a half-dozen young men could well be dressed in jeans, drinking coke, listening to rap, and, between their bows to Mecca, putting together a bomb to blow up an American airliner (Huntington, 1996, p. 58. Quoted in Gusterson 2004, p. 126)”

As intoxication around September 11 thickened, influential left intellectuals like Michael Mann (2001, pp. 69-70) eagerly piggybacked on the Huntington thesis, proposing a left-tinted version of the famous clash of civilizations. Mann acknowledges Huntington’s influence on his discussion of “the cosmology [of the weak] . . . offered by the combat fundamentalists.”

According to bin Laden, the struggle ranges the Muslim against the infidel. To transplant Judeo-Christian symbols of heroism, it is also David against Goliath, and Robin Hood, stealing from the rich to give to the poor—not to mention Good against Evil, God against Satan. This is an appeal of some resonance, especially able to recruit young, educated dissidents in authoritarian states and young refugees, displaced by conflicts right across the Muslim world—neither having much future amid stagnating economies. These two groups are not very large, rarely generating the resources to seize power. But their capacity to disrupt and re-group is considerable, since they enjoy the sympathy of much of the poor and the middle class of the Muslim world.

A similar analysis is taken up by Pierre Mesnard y Mendez (2005, pp. 19, 7) writing in Socialism and Democracy.

What we know of the al Qaeda cadres indicates that they come from the upwardly mobile middle class of Arab nations, mainly Saudi Arabia and Egypt (the two principal US clients), that is blocked from independence and frustrated . . . It does not take much foresight to see that such terrorist groups will become a real threat if they get mass recruits from globalization’s new “informal proletariat,” counting by now two fifths of active population in the []South . . . . The actions of and reactions to al Qaeda (itself a reaction to US domination) are holy warfare of the monotheistic kind: Good against Evil, In God We Trust vs. The Great Satan.

The successful intoxication fostered around September 11 meant that the corporate mass media would classify Iraqi resistance to U.S. and British occupation as al Qaeda terrorism. American propaganda consistently identifies so-called Iraqi “militants” with Osama bin Laden’s henchman Abu Musad Al-Zarqawi (Chossudovsky, 2005, pp. 194-95). The circle is complete: 9-11 and the destruction of Afghanistan and Iraq may be neatly attributed to the “Islamofascist” bin Laden and his gang of terrorists and gangsters. Of course, the left rejects this equation, but the blowback thesis imprisons it within a narrow focus of debate—pitting Western democracy (globalization in the left variant) against an oppressed Muslim world led by deluded adherents of holy war.



7. Conclusion: September 11 as Machiavellian State Terrorism

It is vital in a democracy to question the state’s own account of itself—to engage in what I call, oppositional theorizing. Rather than accepting the official story of 9-11, which contains so many unsatisfactory elements, the left ought to theorize the attacks on New York and Washington from an oppositional standpoint. “Citizens are free . . . so long as nothing is hidden from them. Thus, they must watch, surveil, expose and reveal” (Dean, 2000, p. 16). Sadly, the established left has done the opposite. Respected left commentators have embraced a radicalized version of the White House 9-11 account of September 11. Claiming the attacks are payback for globalization exposes the left to charges of supporting terrorism. Even while denying stereotyped views of Islam, the left hardly doubts bin Laden’s “cartoonish parody . . . [of] Muslims as angry and violent” (Gusterson, 2004, p. 144).

The left embraces a distorted notion of political violence that sees it as an understandable response of the weak to provocations of the powerful. Yet what I have called Machiavellian state terrorism is a common feature in history. Acts of terror are vulnerable to manipulation, and far more likely to be a weapon of state rulers and their agents, than the oppressed masses. As a legitimized protection racket, the state may be tempted to inflict harm secretly on its own citizens in order to achieve unpublicized but highly desired goals. Rival power holders may find it inconvenient to confront lies which help maintain the current regime. This is likely the case with September 11, which provided American power a convenient excuse to conduct wars on Afghanistan and Iraq that had been planned well before. The left abjures conspiracy theory (while accepting the official bin Laden story) but oppositional theorizing—questioning government and looking for connections between events, perceiving the world “to be organized beneath the surface” (Sturken, 1997, p. 77)—is a critical features of what it means to be vitally active in the political universe.


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1. Of course, some forms of political assassination also involve victims other than the intended target: such as, when a bomb is used to kill a political figure which also causes a number of other deaths—airplane sabotage, or bombings in busy urban areas.
2. The World Socialist Website (WSWS) is an exception. WSWS has posted several articles questioning U.S. complicity in the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks. See, for example, Patrick Martin (2002), “Was the US government alerted to September 11 attack?”
3. As Preparata (2005, p. 208) details, plenty of evidence is available to implicate the Nazis in the Reichstag Fire. “With or without evidence, however, in terror ‘is fecit cui prodest’ always: the one who did it is the one benefiting from it—that is, the Nazis themselves.”
4. Parenti is described on the book jacket The Terrorism Trap: September 11 and Beyond as “one of the country’s leading political analysts.”
5. Chalmers Johnson (2000, p. 8) introduced the term a year before September 11 but he used it specifically to refer to unintended consequences of U.S. covert operations. “What the daily press reports as the malign acts of ‘terrorists’ or ‘drug lords’ or ‘rogue states’ or ‘illegal arms merchant’ often turns out to be blowback from earlier American operations.” The left debate has diluted this meaning.
6.Chomsky’s perspective is embraced by a legion of left-writers on ZNet.org.
7. Mary Kaldor, “Regressive Globalisation,” Open Democracy 25 September 2003 http://www.opendemocracy.net/democracy-ame...rticle_1501.jsp. Accessed October 23, 2005.
8. From its inception the FLQ was riddled with police spies, and by the time it ceased operations in 1971 many of its key members worked for the state security apparatus. See, for example, Michael McLoughlin’s (1998) Last Stop Paris: The Assassination of Mario Bachand and the Death of the FLQ.
9.We shall see, however that Tilly understands terrorism as primarily a weapon of excluded groups or individuals.
10.While accepting the blowback theory of September 11, Mesnard y Mendez (2005) unfolds a useful account of state terrorism.
11.J. I. Ross (2003) unveils a useful survey of state and political crime in The Dynamics of Political Crime. Tilly (2002) notes two main forms of modern state terrorism: genocide (aimed at certain racial, religious or ethnic groups) and politicide (directed at “populations identified by political affiliation”).
12.Of course, the full extent of the terror—including many assassinations—was kept secret by the Pinochet regime.
13. “[C]ritical popular films about militarism,” writes Hugh Gusterson (2004, p. 59), “are sometimes able to penetrate the dominant discourse, opening up fissures and enabling the articulation of doubts and queries that might otherwise remain unvoiced.” His remarks apply as well to other forms of cinema.
14. This reputation is largely unearned (Doughty, 2005). Canadian prime ministers have frequently suspended fundamental rights under the infamous War Measures Act, and recently the Canadian intelligence services have handed over Arab-born citizens for interrogation and torture in Syria.
15. Every form of terrorism involves “rather conscious efforts to manipulate perceptions to promote certain interests at the expense of others. When people and events come to be regularly described in public as terrorists and terrorism, some government or other entity is succeeding in a war of words in which the opponent is promoting alternative designations such as ‘martyr’ or ‘liberation struggle’” (Turk, 2004, p 272).
16.It is perhaps not inconsequential that Al Jazeera is located in Doha, Qatar, twenty miles from the site of one of the biggest U.S. armed forces bases in the Middle East.
17.Bergen himself relates an intriguing narrative of possible premature intoxication surrounding 9-11. In late August 2001 Bergen acquired “a two-hour al-Qaeda propaganda videotape circulating around the Middle East that summer.” The tape suggested that bin Laden was planning an imminent attack on American targets. Bergen wrote to reporter John Burns at The New York Times about the tape, which by then was circulating in DVD format in clandestine Internet chat rooms. Burns’s story about the looming menace of Al-Qaeda “appeared on The New York Times Web site on September 9 under the headline, “‘On videotape, Bin Laden Charts a Violent Future.’ But strangely that was the only version of the story that ever appeared, and it was later expunged by the newspaper from the Web site archive.” Bergen laments that “the last best warning to America of what might be failed to see the light of day. (The Times would publish a story by Burns a day after 9/11 that referenced the bin Laden videotape; a piece that had few of the details of the original story and was, alas, too late to make a difference.)”
18.Huntington served as “counterinsurgency expert for the Johnson administration in Vietnam and later director of the Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University” (Ali, 2003, p. 273.)
19.My account of The Clash of Civilizations relies heavily on Gusterson’s (2004) critical analysis of the book.

December 19, 2005
Who Are the War Criminals? Naming Names
Behind every war criminal is a criminal idea
by Justin Raimondo

Editorial note: What follows is the text of a speech delivered on Dec. 16, in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, at the 2005 Perdana Peace Forum.




http://antiwar.org/justin/?articleid=8241