US Sacrificed Aid Agencies That Help Children To Kill Bin Laden

If you ever had any doubt that the hunt to locate and then kill Osama bin Laden was about anything other than vengeance and demonstrating to the world that Captain USA always gets his man, this latest revelation ought to dispel that. First, it was revealed by the UK Guardian newspaper in July that the CIA used a phoney-NGO vaccination program inside Pakistan to locate bin Laden, the prelude to his execution by US Special Forces. The collateral damage of that ploy are now becoming clear with a major aid agency, Save the Children, being forced to shut down operations inside Pakistan because of suspicion of the involvement of NGOs in the illegal assassination.

Furious aid workers say the CIA's reckless use of aid work as a cover by spy agencies has threatened the safety of genuine aid workers and endangered multimillion-pound programmes to help Pakistan's poor.
Save the Children has 2,000 employees in Pakistan and assisted 7 million people in 2010, half of whom where caught in massive floods while the remainder benefited from long-term development programmes.After the security threat in late July, those activities slowed or juddered to a halt.

Now, there are all sorts of critiques one can make about the role of NGOs in the developing world but it is clear that the callous use of the cover provided by western aid agencies working in Pakistan to carry out a revenge mission of more than dubious legality, which would definitely have an impact on the lives of thousands of children, is not only obscene but a true testament of America's arrogance an inhumanity. After nearly a decade of firing missiles from unmanned aerial vehicles into rural and isolated villages, in order to smash a movement whose roots lie in the desire for liberation from imperialism, it is hardly surprising that they would put the work of thousands of aid workers at risk without nary a thought nor a word of apology afterward.

Of course, all of this was so infuriatingly unnecessary. Having created bin Laden with money and weapons and political support for promoting the move conservative forms of resistance to the Soviet invasion, the Americans subsequently left Afghanistan to tear itself apart as former mujahideen fought over who would rule the poverty-stricken, war torn country. Certainly those warlords were corrupt and brutal but the real problem was that the US only cared about defeating their enemy, the Soviet Union, and not about providing the kind of development resources that would have reduced the kind of scarcity - particularly after the withdrawal of military and financial aid during the resistance - that causes civil wars when combined with heavily armed populations.

If that disillusionment in his former masters wasn't enough, the US war against Iraq in 1991 provided the final proof to bin Laden that the US was no friend of Muslims - unless they were immediately useful (a point worth remembering these days in Libya). It was America's abandonment of Afghanistan after it had served its purpose and its brutal war against Iraq - waged from the Muslim holy land of Saudi Arabia - that created bin Laden the enemy of America. But even this needn't have ended up in the massacre of 9/11, the subsequent war in Afghanistan and the present, dangerous deterioration in relations between the US and Pakistan. After bin Laden declared his jihad against the USA and had organized the first attacks on the US - on US embassies in three countries in 1998 and on the USS Cole, a destroyer anchored off of Yemen in 2000 - the Taliban offered both before and after 9/11 to give up bin Laden for trial but the USA wasn't interested in any sort of negotiations or anything short of absolute surrender.

Wakil Ahmad Muttawakil, Taliban’s last foreign minister, told Al Jazeera in an exclusive interview that his government had made several proposals to the United States to present the al-Qaeda leader, considered the mastermind of the 2001 attacks, for trial for his involvement in plots targeting US facilities during the 1990s.
"Even before the [9/11] attacks, our Islamic Emirate had tried through various proposals to resolve the Osama issue. One such proposal was to set up a three-nation court, or something under the supervision of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference [OIC]," Muttawakil said.
"But the US showed no interest in it. They kept demanding we hand him over, but we had no relations with the US, no agreement of any sort. They did not recognise our government."

And once 9/11 had taken place, war was needed to restore American prestige, even if it ended up killing many dozens of times the number of innocent people as died in the World Trade Center (and, while the war against Iraq clearly had no relation whatsoever to 9/11 it caused the premature deaths of perhaps a million people, compared to the 3,000 who died in New York City). This latest atrocity in the interest of America's imperial prestige, at a time of declining American power, will only add fuel to the fire of anti-Americanism and weaken their position in Pakistan and beyond.

I Refuse To Read 9/11 Memorial Coverage

If you're reading this right now you are doing something that I have refused to do: read any coverage or analysis of 9/11. I am boycotting the wall to wall coverage - the pull-out specials in the newspapers, the live coverage of ceremonies at ground zero (I assume there are ceremonies but I haven't been reading the coverage so I can't be sure). I'm even ignoring the critical coverage that is buried underneath all of the jingoism, mourning, and replaying of buildings billowing smoke. After all, what else can be said about 9/11? We know there has been several wars since then - putatively because of 9/11 but, in fact, argued for, threatened and planned for prior to the event. Way back when, everybody was quoting the founding documents of the Project for a New American Century, which advocated war against Iraq (a secular government with no ties - and significant animosity - towards radical Islamism). When we memorialize 9/11 as the reason for those wars we're participating in that lie.

Ah, but there I go, trying to analyze it. The truth is, it's pointless because the event has been drained of any rationality. It has become an endlessly repeated image of those burning towers and the necessary repetition of appropriate regret for the loss of life. There is literally nothing to say that won't be banal and commonplace to those who accept your particular viewpoint of the significance of the day - and which won't be utter blasphemy to those who don't.

Not many would say that I try to avoid thinking about world events and politics. Something happens somewhere in the world and I try to dig up the historical roots and uncover the social forces at play. It's a bit of an obsession at times. But this one event I will let pass - not because it's so special that I need to look away from the horror. 35,000 children die every day from preventable causes. Preventable causes. 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust. Anywhere from hundreds of thousands to 1.2 million died in Iraq as a result of the war - not counting the US enforced sanctions for a decade prior to the war. Nor do I want to ignore 9/11 because it isn't important. Certainly to the 3,000 people killed, their friends and family, 9/11 was a calamitous event. But, just as obviously, it was calamitous to the people who have been killed in wars, the societies destroyed, by wars supposedly in retribution for 9/11 [re: supposedly - see Project for a New American Century above].

No, the reason I won't read about 9/11 - not a word: I caught myself reading Chomsky on the al Jazeera website and forced myself to stop - is because we have lived it for ten years. We have seen it all - and if we happen to live in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine (yes, they got blamed too - we rarely miss a chance to kick the Palestinians around), Pakistan we felt the self-righteous fury of its manufactured response. We have seen this extended to our civil liberties - eroded significantly, almost without protest. We have seen it in a more bellicose form of rhetoric from politicians and media figures and a greater ease of military response to every crisis - we now slip on our fatigues to go and bomb "evil-doers" as easily as we put on our Wellingtons when the rain comes. We all know what 9/11 means and I don't need a special edition of the New York Times or, God help me, Glenn Beck to explain it.

We don't need more memorials. They're building a "Freedom Tower" in New York with 104 floors of skyline-dominating memorial. All you have to do is say "9/11" and every person in the western world, and probably most of the eastern, southern and northern world, can't help but have the iconic image pop into their mind - even if they try to think of the CIA coup against Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973. Even in countries that have suffered much greater tragedies, which is most countries, it was probably on the front page at some point in the last week. Making this event the obsession of the entire planet is somehow deeply pathological, like a monomania as we try to find the right emotional response to an event we're expected to have an emotional response towards. Meanwhile the house is burning down. I hate that I even remembered "where I was when I heard about it" several times today; once at a film festival bbq where we were expected to stop noshing and shmoozing to pay our respects for the dead. No: no more memorials. Talk to me about 9/11 when, instead of verbiage and symbols - and guns and bombs and F-35 fighter jets that cost a ba-zillion dollars - the memorial that is being offered is a plan to eliminate poverty at home and abroad, to stop supporting dictatorships that are convenient and bombing ones that aren't (especially the democratic ones that we call dictatorships because we don't like how people voted). In the meantime, stop trying to prove how profoundly on top of the meaning of the event you are in order to sell newspapers (how much extra has the New York Times made selling it's coverage - like to the T.O. Star?) or get people to tune in. It's like Christmas Day when no matter which channel you turn to you get people singing Christmas carols or delivering sermons. Just. Stop. Already.