This diary entry reproduces in slightly modified form a comment a made on a thread elsewhere. I received a suggestion to post it as a diary to make it somewhat more visible. It has been a number of day since my last diary posting, so I decided to comply with the suggestion.
I believe it is wealth worth the time to look below the fold for the real contents of this post.
William Odom is a retired Army 3-star who headed the NSA several adminstrations ago. In the Fall 2004 issue of
Dissent he has a powerful piece in a colloquium on whether this nation is facing a Constitutional crisis. Let me quote the beginning to show the power of the piece. I will then offer a second selection whose relevant should be apparent.
Because no act of terrorism has yet destroyed a liberal democracy but acts of parliaments have closed a few, Americans should ask of the new U. S. policies, laws, and practices in reaction to the attacks of September 11, 2001, are more threatening to their liberties than Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda.
I wanted to bring this article to your attention because of three specific paragraphs, a bit later, the third of which deals with Allawi, but also with the whole idea of terrorism in a way that might surprise some, given Odom's background.
Odom prefaces what I begin with by noting Edmund Burke's rage against the British government in its attempts to suppress the American colonists specifically in what was called the American Treason Act, which justified ill-treatment on grounds that may have some impact. The quoted passage is from Burke's 1777 A Letter to the Sheriffs in the City of Bristol
Burke was outraged that the American Treason Act provided for a partial suspension of habeas corpus and enabled the king's "administration to confine, as ong as it shall think proper, those, when that act is pleased to qualify by the name of pirates." Thus they could be "... detained in prison ... to a future trial and ignominious punishment, whenever circumstances shall make it convenient to execute vengeance on them under the coulour of that odious and infamous offence."
If one thinks of the Guantanamo prison and changes "piracy" to "terrorism," then Burke's charge sounds surprisingly contemporary. The "terrorism" label is source of great mischief in U. S. policy. So-called acts of terrorism are crimes if committed within a U. S. jurisdiction; they are acts of war if committed from abroad against U. S. citizens or interests. In other words, we have more precise terms for so-called terrorist acts, words far more appropriate for legal statutes. Terrorism is a political label intended to whip up anger against one's enemy, not to ensure justice in the due process of law. Shouting furiously at the world about the evils of "terrorism" makes the United States look hypocritical, if not downright silly and incompetent.
By the Bush administration's definition of the word, Iyad Allawi, whom it supported for the interim prime minister of Iraq, is a terrorist, one supplied with car bombs by U. S. intelligence officials several years ago to use against Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq. To point this out is not to criticize the policy -- except for its fecklessness -- but to remind us that the United States is not always averse to terrorism. When Senator Abraham Ribicoff enrolled a bill in 1979 against "international terrorism," it could not be enacted into law because any way the term was defined, the United States was a violator. Such an ambiguous category can only lead to bad policies and great injustices.
I note that Allawi is not the only leader we have supported who has used terrorism, and whom we have provided with assistance in what could be classified as terrorism. In so noting, I am NOT in the position of "blame America" as I have been recently accused, but pointing out that we have a real need to understand how others view us, and why. It is not that "they hate us because of our freeedoms" but that they hate and fear us because of our actions and our policies and most of all because of our hypocrisy.