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Ward Churchill responds to attacks... |
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by finn
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04 Feb 2005
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Press Release - by Ward Churchill
January 31, 2005
* |
In the last few days there has been widespread and grossly inaccurate media coverage concerning my analysis of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, coverage that has resulted in defamation of my character and threats against my life. What I actually said has been lost, indeed turned into the opposite of itself, and I hope the following facts will be reported at least to the same extent that the fabrications have been.
* The piece circulating on the internet was developed into a book, On the Justice of Roosting Chickens. Most of the book is a detailed chronology of U.S. military interventions since 1776 and U.S. violations of international law since World War II. My point is that we cannot allow the U.S. government, acting in our name, to engage in massive violations of international law and fundamental human rights and not expect to reap the consequences.
* I am not a "defender" of the September 11 attacks, but simply pointing out that if U.S. foreign policy results in massive death and destruction abroad, we cannot feign innocence when some of that destruction is returned. I have never said that people should engage in armed attacks on the United States, but that such attacks are a natural and unavoidable consequence of unlawful U.S. policy. As Martin Luther King, quoting Robert F. Kennedy, said, "Those who make peaceful change impossible make violent change inevitable."
* This is not to say that I advocate violence; as a U.S. soldier in Vietnam I witnessed and participated in more violence than I ever wish to see. What I am saying is that if we want an end to violence, especially that perpetrated against civilians, we must take the responsibility for halting the slaughter perpetrated by the United States around the world. My feelings are reflected in Dr. King's April 1967 Riverside speech, where, when asked about the wave of urban rebellions in U.S. cities, he said, "I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed . . . without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today - my own government."
* In 1996 Madeleine Albright, then Ambassador to the UN and soon to be U.S.
Secretary of State, did not dispute that 500,000 Iraqi children had died as a result of economic sanctions, but stated on national television that "we had decided it was 'worth the cost.'" I mourn the victims of the September 11 attacks, just as I mourn the deaths of those Iraqi children, the more than 3 million people killed in the war in Indochina, those who died in the U.S. invasions of Grenada, Panama and elsewhere in Central America, the victims of the transatlantic slave trade, and the indigenous peoples still subjected to genocidal policies. If we respond with callous disregard to the deaths of others, we can only expect equal callousness to American deaths.
* Finally, I have never characterized all the September 11 victims as "Nazis." What I said was that the "technocrats of empire" working in the World Trade Center were the equivalent of "little Eichmanns." Adolf Eichmann was not charged with direct killing but with ensuring the smooth running of the infrastructure that enabled the Nazi genocide. Similarly, German industrialists were legitimately targeted by the Allies.
* It is not disputed that the Pentagon was a military target, or that a CIA office was situated in the World Trade Center. Following the logic by which U.S. Defense Department spokespersons have consistently sought to justify target selection in places like Baghdad, this placement of an element of the American „command and control infrastructure‰ in an ostensibly civilian facility converted the Trade Center itself into a "legitimate" target. Again following U.S. military doctrine, as announced in briefing after briefing, those who did not work for the CIA but were nonetheless killed in the attack amounted to no more than „collateral damage.‰ If the U.S. public is prepared to accept these „standards‰ when the are routinely applied to other people, they should be not be surprised when the same standards are applied to them.
* It should be emphasized that I applied the "little Eichmanns" characterization only to those described as "technicians." Thus, it was obviously not directed to the children, janitors, food service workers, firemen and random passers-by killed in the 9-1-1 attack. According to Pentagon logic, were simply part of the collateral damage. Ugly? Yes. Hurtful? Yes. And that's my point. It's no less ugly, painful or dehumanizing a description when applied to Iraqis, Palestinians, or anyone else. If we ourselves do not want to be treated in this fashion, we must refuse to allow others to be similarly devalued and dehumanized in our name.
* The bottom line of my argument is that the best and perhaps only way to prevent 9-1-1-style attacks on the U.S. is for American citizens to compel their government to comply with the rule of law. The lesson of Nuremberg is that this is not only our right, but our obligation. To the extent we shirk this responsibility, we, like the "Good Germans" of the 1930s and '40s, are complicit in its actions and have no legitimate basis for complaint when we suffer the consequences. This, of course, includes me, personally, as well as my family, no less than anyone else.
* These points are clearly stated and documented in my book, On the Justice of Roosting Chickens, which recently won Honorary Mention for the Gustavus Myer Human Rights Award. for best writing on human rights. Some people will, of course, disagree with my analysis, but it presents questions that must be addressed in academic and public debate if we are to find a real solution to the violence that pervades today's world. The gross distortions of what I actually said can only be viewed as an attempt to distract the public from the real issues at hand and to further stifle freedom of speech and academic debate in this country.
Press Release - by Ward Churchill
January 31, 2005
*
"Some People Push Back" On the Justice of Roosting Chickens
written by Ward Churchill // 9-11-2001
This article appeared in Pockets of Resistance #11 September 2001
When queried by reporters concerning his views on the assassination of John F. Kennedy in November 1963, Malcolm X famously - and quite charitably, all things considered - replied that it was merely a case of "chickens coming home to roost."
On the morning of September 11, 2001, a few more chickens - along with some half-million dead Iraqi children - came home to roost in a very big way at the twin towers of New York's World Trade Center. Well, actually, a few of them seem to have nestled in at the Pentagon as well.
The Iraqi youngsters, all of them under 12, died as a predictable - in fact, widely predicted - result of the 1991 US "surgical" bombing of their country's water purification and sewage facilities, as well as other "infrastructural" targets upon which Iraq's civilian population depends for its very survival.
If the nature of the bombing were not already bad enough - and it should be noted that this sort of "aerial warfare" constitutes a Class I Crime Against humanity, entailing myriad gross violations of international law, as well as every conceivable standard of "civilized" behavior - the death toll has been steadily ratcheted up by US-imposed sanctions for a full decade now. Enforced all the while by a massive military presence and periodic bombing raids, the embargo has greatly impaired the victims' ability to import the nutrients, medicines and other materials necessary to saving the lives of even their toddlers.
All told, Iraq has a population of about 18 million. The 500,000 kids lost to date thus represent something on the order of 25 percent of their age group. Indisputably, the rest have suffered - are still suffering - a combination of physical debilitation and psychological trauma severe enough to prevent their ever fully recovering. In effect, an entire generation has been obliterated.
The reason for this holocaust was/is rather simple, and stated quite straightforwardly by President George Bush, the 41st "freedom-loving" father of the freedom-lover currently filling the Oval Office, George the 43rd: "The world must learn that what we say, goes," intoned George the Elder to the enthusiastic applause of freedom-loving Americans everywhere.
How Old George conveyed his message was certainly no mystery to the US public. One need only recall the 24-hour-per-day dissemination of bombardment videos on every available TV channel, and the exceedingly high ratings of these telecasts, to gain a sense of how much they knew.
In trying to affix a meaning to such things, we would do well to remember the wave of elation that swept America at reports of what was happening along the so-called Highway of Death: perhaps 100,000 "towel-heads" and "camel jockeys" - or was it "sand niggers" that week? - in full retreat, routed and effectively defenseless, many of them conscripted civilian laborers, slaughtered in a single day by jets firing the most hyper-lethal types of ordnance.
It was a performance worthy of the nazis during the early months of their drive into Russia. And it should be borne in mind that Good Germans gleefully cheered that butchery, too. Indeed, support for Hitler suffered no serious erosion among Germany's "innocent civilians" until the defeat at Stalingrad in 1943.
There may be a real utility to reflecting further, this time upon the fact that it was pious Americans who led the way in assigning the onus of collective guilt to the German people as a whole, not for things they as individuals had done, but for what they had allowed - nay, empowered - their leaders and their soldiers to do in their name.
If the principle was valid then, it remains so now, as applicable to Good Americans as it was the Good Germans. And the price exacted from the Germans for the faultiness of their moral fiber was truly ghastly.
Returning now to the children, and to the effects of the post-Gulf War embargo - continued bull force by Bush the Elder's successors in the Clinton administration as a gesture of its "resolve" to finalize what George himself had dubbed the "New World Order" of American military/economic domination - it should be noted that not one but two high United Nations officials attempting to coordinate delivery of humanitarian aid to Iraq resigned in succession as protests against US policy.
One of them, former U.N. Assistant Secretary General Denis Halladay, repeatedly denounced what was happening as "a systematic program . . . of deliberate genocide." His statements appeared in the New York Times and other papers during the fall of 1998, so it can hardly be contended that the American public was "unaware" of them.
Shortly thereafter, Secretary of State Madeline Albright openly confirmed Halladay's assessment. Asked during the widely-viewed TV program Meet the Press to respond to his "allegations," she calmly announced that she'd decided it was "worth the price" to see that U.S. objectives were achieved.
The Politics of a Perpetrator Population
As a whole, the American public greeted these revelations with yawns..
There were, after all, far more pressing things than the unrelenting misery/death of a few hundred thousand Iraqi tikes to be concerned with. Getting "Jeremy" and "Ellington" to their weekly soccer game, for instance, or seeing to it that little "Tiffany" an "Ashley" had just the right roll-neck sweaters to go with their new cords. And, to be sure, there was the yuppie holy war against ashtrays - for "our kids," no less - as an all-absorbing point of political focus.
In fairness, it must be admitted that there was an infinitesimally small segment of the body politic who expressed opposition to what was/is being done to the children of Iraq. It must also be conceded, however, that those involved by-and-large contented themselves with signing petitions and conducting candle-lit prayer vigils, bearing "moral witness" as vast legions of brown-skinned five-year-olds sat shivering in the dark, wide-eyed in horror, whimpering as they expired in the most agonizing ways imaginable.
Be it said as well, and this is really the crux of it, that the "resistance" expended the bulk of its time and energy harnessed to the systemically-useful task of trying to ensure, as "a principle of moral virtue" that nobody went further than waving signs as a means of "challenging" the patently exterminatory pursuit of Pax Americana. So pure of principle were these "dissidents," in fact, that they began literally to supplant the police in protecting corporations profiting by the carnage against suffering such retaliatory "violence" as having their windows broken by persons less "enlightened" - or perhaps more outraged - than the self-anointed "peacekeepers."
Property before people, it seems - or at least the equation of property to people - is a value by no means restricted to America's boardrooms. And the sanctimony with which such putrid sentiments are enunciated turns out to be nauseatingly similar, whether mouthed by the CEO of Standard Oil or any of the swarm of comfort zone "pacifists" queuing up to condemn the black block after it ever so slightly disturbed the functioning of business-as-usual in Seattle.
Small wonder, all-in-all, that people elsewhere in the world - the Mideast, for instance - began to wonder where, exactly, aside from the streets of the US itself, one was to find the peace America's purportedly oppositional peacekeepers claimed they were keeping.
The answer, surely, was plain enough to anyone unblinded by the kind of delusions engendered by sheer vanity and self-absorption.
So, too, were the implications in terms of anything changing, out there, in America's free-fire zones.
Tellingly, it was at precisely this point - with the genocide in Iraq officially admitted and a public response demonstrating beyond a shadow of a doubt that there were virtually no Americans, including most of those professing otherwise, doing anything tangible to stop it - that the combat teams which eventually commandeered the aircraft used on September 11 began to infiltrate the United States.
Meet the "Terrorists"
Of the men who came, there are a few things demanding to be said in the face of the unending torrent of disinformational drivel unleashed by George Junior and the corporate "news" media immediately following their successful operation on September 11.
They did not, for starters, "initiate" a war with the US, much less commit "the first acts of war of the new millennium."
A good case could be made that the war in which they were combatants has been waged more-or-less continuously by the "Christian West" - now proudly emblematized by the United States - against the "Islamic East" since the time of the First Crusade, about 1,000 years ago. More recently, one could argue that the war began when Lyndon Johnson first lent significant support to Israel's dispossession/displacement of Palestinians during the 1960s, or when George the Elder ordered "Desert Shield" in 1990, or at any of several points in between. Any way you slice it, however, if what the combat teams did to the WTC and the Pentagon can be understood as acts of war - and they can - then the same is true of every US "overflight' of Iraqi territory since day one. The first acts of war during the current millennium thus occurred on its very first day, and were carried out by U.S. aviators acting under orders from their then-commander-in-chief, Bill Clinton. The most that can honestly be said of those involved on September 11 is that they finally responded in kind to some of what this country has dispensed to their people as a matter of course. That they waited so long to do so is, notwithstanding the 1993 action at the WTC, more than anything a testament to their patience and restraint.
They did not license themselves to "target innocent civilians."
There is simply no argument to be made that the Pentagon personnel killed on September 11 fill that bill. The building and those inside comprised military targets, pure and simple. As to those in the World Trade Center . . . Well, really. Let's get a grip here, shall we? True enough, they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break. They formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America's global financial empire - the "mighty engine of profit" to which the military dimension of U.S. policy has always been enslaved - and they did so both willingly and knowingly. Recourse to "ignorance" - a derivative, after all, of the word "ignore" - counts as less than an excuse among this relatively well-educated elite. To the extent that any of them were unaware of the costs and consequences to others of what they were involved in - and in many cases excelling at - it was because of their absolute refusal to see. More likely, it was because they were too busy braying, incessantly and self-importantly, into their cell phones, arranging power lunches and stock transactions, each of which translated, conveniently out of sight, mind and smelling distance, into the starved and rotting flesh of infants. If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I'd really be interested in hearing about it.
The men who flew the missions against the WTC and Pentagon were not "cowards."
That distinction properly belongs to the "firm-jawed lads" who delighted in flying stealth aircraft through the undefended airspace of Baghdad, dropping payload after payload of bombs on anyone unfortunate enough to be below - including tens of thousands of genuinely innocent civilians - while themselves incurring all the risk one might expect during a visit to the local video arcade. Still more, the word describes all those "fighting men and women" who sat at computer consoles aboard ships in the Persian Gulf, enjoying air-conditioned comfort while launching cruise missiles into neighborhoods filled with random human beings. Whatever else can be said of them, the men who struck on September 11 manifested the courage of their convictions, willingly expending their own lives in attaining their objectives.
Nor were they "fanatics" devoted to "Islamic fundamentalism."
One might rightly describe their actions as "desperate." Feelings of desperation, however, are a perfectly reasonable - one is tempted to say "normal" - emotional response among persons confronted by the mass murder of their children, particularly when it appears that nobody else really gives a damn (ask a Jewish survivor about this one, or, even more poignantly, for all the attention paid them, a Gypsy). That desperate circumstances generate desperate responses is no mysterious or irrational principle, of the sort motivating fanatics. Less is it one peculiar to Islam. Indeed, even the FBI's investigative reports on the combat teams' activities during the months leading up to September 11 make it clear that the members were not fundamentalist Muslims. Rather, it's pretty obvious at this point that they were secular activists - soldiers, really - who, while undoubtedly enjoying cordial relations with the clerics of their countries, were motivated far more by the grisly realities of the U.S. war against them than by a set of religious beliefs.
And still less were they/their acts "insane."
Insanity is a condition readily associable with the very American idea that one - or one's country - holds what amounts to a "divine right" to commit genocide, and thus to forever do so with impunity. The term might also be reasonably applied to anyone suffering genocide without attempting in some material way to bring the process to a halt. Sanity itself, in this frame of reference, might be defined by a willingness to try and destroy the perpetrators and/or the sources of their ability to commit their crimes. (Shall we now discuss the US "strategic bombing campaign" against Germany during World War II, and the mental health of those involved in it?)
Which takes us to official characterizations of the combat teams as an embodiment of "evil."
Evil - for those inclined to embrace the banality of such a concept - was perfectly incarnated in that malignant toad known as Madeline Albright, squatting in her studio chair like Jaba the Hutt, blandly spewing the news that she'd imposed a collective death sentence upon the unoffending youth of Iraq. Evil was to be heard in that great American hero "Stormin' Norman" Schwartzkopf's utterly dehumanizing dismissal of their systematic torture and annihilation as mere "collateral damage." Evil, moreover, is a term appropriate to describing the mentality of a public that finds such perspectives and the policies attending them acceptable, or even momentarily tolerable.
Had it not been for these evils, the counterattacks of September 11 would never have occurred. And unless "the world is rid of such evil," to lift a line from George Junior, September 11 may well end up looking like a lark. There is no reason, after all, to believe that the teams deployed in the assaults on the WTC and the Pentagon were the only such, that the others are composed of "Arabic-looking individuals" - America's indiscriminately lethal arrogance and psychotic sense of self-entitlement have long since given the great majority of the world's peoples ample cause to be at war with it - or that they are in any way dependent upon the seizure of civilian airliners to complete their missions.
To the contrary, there is every reason to expect that there are many other teams in place, tasked to employ altogether different tactics in executing operational plans at least as well-crafted as those evident on September 11, and very well equipped for their jobs. This is to say that, since the assaults on the WTC and Pentagon were act of war - not "terrorist incidents" - they must be understood as components in a much broader strategy designed to achieve specific results. From this, it can only be adduced that there are plenty of other components ready to go, and that they will be used, should this become necessary in the eyes of the strategists. It also seems a safe bet that each component is calibrated to inflict damage at a level incrementally higher than the one before (during the 1960s, the Johnson administration employed a similar policy against Vietnam, referred to as "escalation").
Since implementation of the overall plan began with the WTC/Pentagon assaults, it takes no rocket scientist to decipher what is likely to happen next, should the U.S. attempt a response of the inexcusable variety to which it has long entitled itself.
About Those Boys (and Girls) in the Bureau
There's another matter begging for comment at this point. The idea that the FBI's "counterterrorism task forces" can do a thing to prevent what will happen is yet another dimension of America's delusional pathology.. The fact is that, for all its publicly-financed "image-building" exercises, the Bureau has never shown the least aptitude for anything of the sort.
Oh, yeah, FBI counterintelligence personnel have proven quite adept at framing anarchists, communists and Black Panthers, sometimes murdering them in their beds or the electric chair. The Bureau's SWAT units have displayed their ability to combat child abuse in Waco by burning babies alive, and its vaunted Crime Lab has been shown to pad its "crime-fighting' statistics by fabricating evidence against many an alleged car thief. But actual "heavy-duty bad guys" of the sort at issue now?
This isn't a Bruce Willis/Chuck Norris/Sly Stallone movie, after all.. And J. Edgar Hoover doesn't get to approve either the script or the casting.
The number of spies, saboteurs and bona fide terrorists apprehended, or even detected by the FBI in the course of its long and slimy history could be counted on one's fingers and toes. On occasion, its agents have even turned out to be the spies, and, in many instances, the terrorists as well.
To be fair once again, if the Bureau functions as at best a carnival of clowns where its "domestic security responsibilities" are concerned, this is because - regardless of official hype - it has none. It is now, as it's always been, the national political police force, and instrument created and perfected to ensure that all Americans, not just the consenting mass, are "free" to do exactly as they're told.
The FBI and "cooperating agencies" can be thus relied upon to set about "protecting freedom" by destroying whatever rights and liberties were left to U.S. citizens before September 11 (in fact, they've already received authorization to begin). Sheeplike, the great majority of Americans can also be counted upon to bleat their approval, at least in the short run, believing as they always do that the nasty implications of what they're doing will pertain only to others.
Oh Yeah, and "The Company," Too
A possibly even sicker joke is the notion, suddenly in vogue, that the CIA will be able to pinpoint "terrorist threats," "rooting out their infrastructure" where it exists and/or "terminating" it before it can materialize, if only it's allowed to beef up its "human intelligence gathering capacity" in an unrestrained manner (including full-bore operations inside the US, of course).
Yeah. Right.
Since America has a collective attention-span of about 15 minutes, a little refresher seems in order: "The Company" had something like a quarter-million people serving as "intelligence assets" by feeding it information in Vietnam in 1968, and it couldn't even predict the Tet Offensive. God knows how many spies it was fielding against the USSR at the height of Ronald Reagan's version of the Cold War, and it was still caught flatfooted by the collapse of the Soviet Union.
As to destroying "terrorist infrastructures," one would do well to remember Operation Phoenix, another product of its open season in Vietnam. In that one, the CIA enlisted elite US units like the Navy Seals and Army Special Forces, as well as those of friendly countries - the south Vietnamese Rangers, for example, and Australian SAS - to run around "neutralizing" folks targeted by The Company's legion of snitches as "guerrillas" (as those now known as "terrorists" were then called).
Sound familiar?
Upwards of 40,000 people - mostly bystanders, as it turns out - were murdered by Phoenix hit teams before the guerrillas, stronger than ever, ran the US and its collaborators out of their country altogether.
And these are the guys who are gonna save the day, if unleashed to do their thing in North America?
The net impact of all this "counterterrorism" activity upon the combat teams' ability to do what they came to do, of course, will be nil. Instead, it's likely to make it easier for them to operate (it's worked that way in places like Northern Ireland). And, since denying Americans the luxury of reaping the benefits of genocide in comfort was self-evidently a key objective of the WTC/Pentagon assaults, it can be stated unequivocally that a more overt display of the police state mentality already pervading this country simply confirms the magnitude of their victory.
On Matters of Proportion and Intent
As things stand, including the 1993 detonation at the WTC, "Arab terrorists" have responded to the massive and sustained American terror bombing of Iraq with a total of four assaults by explosives inside the US. That's about 1% of the 50,000 bombs the Pentagon announced were rained on Baghdad alone during the Gulf War (add in Oklahoma City and you'll get something nearer an actual 1%). They've managed in the process to kill about 5,000 Americans, or roughly 1% of the dead Iraqi children (the percentage is far smaller if you factor in the killing of adult Iraqi civilians, not to mention troops butchered as/after they'd surrendered and/or after the "war-ending" ceasefire had been announced).
In terms undoubtedly more meaningful to the property/profit-minded American mainstream, they've knocked down a half-dozen buildings - albeit some very well-chosen ones - as opposed to the "strategic devastation" visited upon the whole of Iraq, and punched a $100 billion hole in the earnings outlook of major corporate shareholders, as opposed to the U.S. obliteration of Iraq's entire economy.
With that, they've given Americans a tiny dose of their own medicine..
This might be seen as merely a matter of "vengeance" or "retribution," and, unquestionably, America has earned it, even if it were to add up only to something so ultimately petty.
The problem is that vengeance is usually framed in terms of "getting even," a concept which is plainly inapplicable in this instance. As the above data indicate, it would require another 49,996 detonations killing 495,000 more Americans, for the "terrorists" to "break even" for the bombing of Baghdad/extermination of Iraqi children alone. And that's to achieve "real number" parity. To attain an actual proportional parity of damage - the US is about 15 times as large as Iraq in terms of population, even more in terms of territory - they would, at a minimum, have to blow up about 300,000 more buildings and kill something on the order of 7.5 million people.
Were this the intent of those who've entered the US to wage war against it, it would remain no less true that America and Americans were only receiving the bill for what they'd already done.
Payback, as they say, can be a real motherfucker (ask the Germans).
There is, however, no reason to believe that retributive parity is necessarily an item on the agenda of those who planned the WTC/Pentagon operation. If it were, given the virtual certainty that they possessed the capacity to have inflicted far more damage than they did, there would be a lot more American bodies lying about right now.
Hence, it can be concluded that ravings carried by the "news" media since September 11 have contained at least one grain of truth: The peoples of the Mideast "aren't like" Americans, not least because they don't "value life' in the same way. By this, it should be understood that Middle-Easterners, unlike Americans, have no history of exterminating others purely for profit, or on the basis of racial animus. Thus, we can appreciate the fact that they value life - all lives, not just their own - far more highly than do their U.S. counterparts.
The Makings of a Humanitarian Strategy
In sum one can discern a certain optimism - it might even be call humanitarianism - imbedded in the thinking of those who presided over the very limited actions conducted on September 11.
Their logic seems to have devolved upon the notion that the American people have condoned what has been/is being done in their name - indeed, are to a significant extent actively complicit in it - mainly because they have no idea what it feels like to be on the receiving end.
Now they do.
That was the "medicinal" aspect of the attacks.
To all appearances, the idea is now to give the tonic a little time to take effect, jolting Americans into the realization that the sort of pain they're now experiencing first-hand is no different from - or the least bit more excruciating than - that which they've been so cavalier in causing others, and thus to respond appropriately.
More bluntly, the hope was - and maybe still is - that Americans, stripped of their presumed immunity from incurring any real consequences for their behavior, would comprehend and act upon a formulation as uncomplicated as "stop killing our kids, if you want your own to be safe."
Either way, it's a kind of "reality therapy" approach, designed to afford the American people a chance to finally "do the right thing" on their own, without further coaxing.
Were the opportunity acted upon in some reasonably good faith fashion - a sufficiently large number of Americans rising up and doing whatever is necessary to force an immediate lifting of the sanctions on Iraq, for instance, or maybe hanging a few of America's abundant supply of major war criminals (Henry Kissinger comes quickly to mind, as do Madeline Albright, Colin Powell, Bill Clinton and George the Elder) - there is every reason to expect that military operations against the US on its domestic front would be immediately suspended.
Whether they would remain so would of course be contingent upon follow-up. By that, it may be assumed that American acceptance of onsite inspections by international observers to verify destruction of its weapons of mass destruction (as well as dismantlement of all facilities in which more might be manufactured), Nuremberg-style trials in which a few thousand US military/corporate personnel could be properly adjudicated and punished for their Crimes Against humanity, and payment of reparations to the array of nations/peoples whose assets the US has plundered over the years, would suffice.
Since they've shown no sign of being unreasonable or vindictive, it may even be anticipated that, after a suitable period of adjustment and reeducation (mainly to allow them to acquire the skills necessary to living within their means), those restored to control over their own destinies by the gallant sacrifices of the combat teams the WTC and Pentagon will eventually (re)admit Americans to the global circle of civilized societies. Stranger things have happened.
In the Alternative
Unfortunately, noble as they may have been, such humanitarian aspirations were always doomed to remain unfulfilled. For it to have been otherwise, a far higher quality of character and intellect would have to prevail among average Americans than is actually the case.
Perhaps the strategists underestimated the impact a couple of generations-worth of media indoctrination can produce in terms of demolishing the capacity of human beings to form coherent thoughts. Maybe they forgot to factor in the mind-numbing effects of the indoctrination passed off as education in the US.
Then, again, it's entirely possible they were aware that a decisive majority of American adults have been reduced by this point to a level much closer to the kind of immediate self-gratification entailed in Pavlovian stimulus/response patterns than anything accessible by appeals to higher logic, and still felt morally obliged to offer the dolts an option to quit while they were ahead.
What the hell? It was worth a try.
But it's becoming increasingly apparent that the dosage of medicine administered was entirely insufficient to accomplish its purpose.
Although there are undoubtedly exceptions, Americans for the most part still don't get it.
Already, they've desecrated the temporary tomb of those killed in the WTC, staging a veritable pep rally atop the mangled remains of those they profess to honor, treating the whole affair as if it were some bizarre breed of contact sport. And, of course, there are the inevitable pom-poms shaped like American flags, the school colors worn as little red-white-and-blue ribbons affixed to labels, sportscasters in the form of "counterterrorism experts" drooling mindless color commentary during the pregame warm-up.
Refusing the realization that the world has suddenly shifted its axis, and that they are therefore no longer "in charge," they have by-and-large reverted instantly to type, working themselves into their usual bloodlust on the now obsolete premise that the bloodletting will "naturally" occur elsewhere and to someone else.
"Patriotism," a wise man once observed, "is the last refuge of scoundrels."
And the braided, he might of added.
Braided Scoundrel-in-Chief, George Junior, lacking even the sense to be careful what he wished for, has teamed up with a gaggle of fundamentalist Christian clerics like Billy Graham to proclaim a "New Crusade" called "Infinite Justice" aimed at "ridding the world of evil."
One could easily make light of such rhetoric, remarking upon how unseemly it is for a son to threaten his father in such fashion - or a president to so publicly contemplate the murder/suicide of himself and his cabinet - but the matter is deadly serious.
They are preparing once again to sally forth for the purpose of roasting brown-skinned children by the scores of thousands. Already, the B-1 bombers and the aircraft carriers and the missile frigates are en route, the airborne divisions are gearing up to go.
To where? Afghanistan?
The Sudan?
Iraq, again (or still)?
How about Grenada (that was fun)?
Any of them or all. It doesn't matter.
The desire to pummel the helpless runs rabid as ever.
Only, this time it's different.
The time the helpless aren't, or at least are not so helpless as they were.
This time, somewhere, perhaps in an Afghani mountain cave, possibly in a Brooklyn basement, maybe another local altogether - but somewhere, all the same - there's a grim-visaged (wo)man wearing a Clint Eastwood smile.
"Go ahead, punks," s/he's saying, "Make my day."
And when they do, when they launch these airstrikes abroad - or may a little later; it will be at a time conforming to the "terrorists"' own schedule, and at a place of their choosing - the next more intensive dose of medicine administered here "at home."
Of what will it consist this time? Anthrax? Mustard gas? Sarin? A tactical nuclear device?
That, too, is their choice to make.
Looking back, it will seem to future generations inexplicable why Americans were unable on their own, and in time to save themselves, to accept a rule of nature so basic that it could be mouthed by an actor, Lawrence Fishburn, in a movie, The Cotton Club.
"You've got to learn, " the line went, "that when you push people around, some people push back."
As they should.
As they must.
And as they undoubtedly will.
There is justice in such symmetry.
ADDENDUM
The preceding was a "first take" reading, more a stream-of-consciousness interpretive reaction to the September 11 counterattack than a finished piece on the topic. Hence, I'll readily admit that I've been far less than thorough, and quite likely wrong about a number of things.
For instance, it may not have been (only) the ghosts of Iraqi children who made their appearance that day. It could as easily have been some or all of their butchered Palestinian cousins.
Or maybe it was some or all of the at least 3.2 million Indochinese who perished as a result of America's sustained and genocidal assault on Southeast Asia (1959-1975), not to mention the millions more who've died because of the sanctions imposed thereafter.
Perhaps there were a few of the Korean civilians massacred by US troops at places like No Gun Ri during the early '50s, or the hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians ruthlessly incinerated in the ghastly fire raids of World War II (only at Dresden did America bomb Germany in a similar manner).
And, of course, it could have been those vaporized in the militarily pointless nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
There are others, as well, a vast and silent queue of faceless victims, stretching from the million-odd Filipinos slaughtered during America's "Indian War" in their islands at the beginning of the twentieth century, through the real Indians, America's own, massacred wholesale at places like Horseshoe Bend and the Bad Axe, Sand Creek and Wounded Knee, the Washita, Bear River, and the Marias.
Was it those who expired along the Cherokee Trial of Tears of the Long Walk of the Navajo?
Those murdered by smallpox at Fort Clark in 1836?
Starved to death in the concentration camp at Bosque Redondo during the 1860s?
Maybe those native people claimed for scalp bounty in all 48 of the continental US states? Or the Raritans whose severed heads were kicked for sport along the streets of what was then called New Amsterdam, at the very site where the WTC once stood?
One hears, too, the whispers of those lost on the Middle Passage, and of those whose very flesh was sold in the slave market outside the human kennel from whence Wall Street takes its name.
And of coolie laborers, imported by the gross-dozen to lay the tracks of empire across scorching desert sands, none of them allotted "a Chinaman's chance" of surviving.
The list is too long, too awful to go on.
No matter what its eventual fate, America will have gotten off very, very cheap.
The full measure of its guilt can never be fully balanced or atoned for.
Ward Churchill is professor of American Indian Studies with the Department of Ethnic studies, University of Colorado at Boulder. |
This work is in the public domain |
Comments
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Re: Ward Churchill responds to attacks... |
by Joe Futrelle
futrelle (nospam) shout.net (verified) |
Current rating: 0
05 Feb 2005
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Churchill is a troll--a left-wing Ann Coulter. |
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Re: Ward Churchill responds to attacks... |
by Joe Futrelle
futrelle (nospam) shout.net (verified) |
Current rating: 0
05 Feb 2005
|
Published on Friday, February 4, 2005 by CommonDreams.org
Ward Churchill's Banality of Evil
The right to free speech doesn't mean you're right
by Anthony Lappé
Controversial statements by radical University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill have become the latest 9/11 free speech flame-up. In an essay that has since been developed into a book entitled “Justice of Roosting Chickens,” he compared “technocrats” inside the World Trade Center to Adolf Eichmann, Hitler’s Final Solution logistics man. Churchill strongly implied the WTC “technocrat’s” complicity in the machinations of the American empire made them legitimate targets of the 9/11 hijackers. He wrote:
Well, really. Let’s get a grip here, shall we? True enough, they [technocrats] were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break. They formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America’s global financial empire – the “mighty engine of profit” to which the military dimension of U.S. policy has always been enslaved – and they did so both willingly and knowingly. Recourse to “ignorance” – a derivative, after all, of the word “ignore” – counts as less than an excuse among this relatively well-educated elite. To the extent that any of them were unaware of the costs and consequences to others of what they were involved in – and in many cases excelling at – it was because of their absolute refusal to see. More likely, it was because they were too busy braying, incessantly and self-importantly, into their cell phones, arranging power lunches and stock transactions, each of which translated, conveniently out of sight, mind and smelling distance, into the starved and rotting flesh of infants. If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I’d really be interested in hearing about it. [emphasis added]
Strong stuff. Other public figures have found themselves in hot water for making controversial statements about 9/11. On 9/12, Noam Chomsky noted the attacks were neither unexpected or unprecedented in the scope of recent human suffering. His timing left something to be desired, but he was making a fairly mundane observation. Churchill is making a much more radical statement here. He has since issued an explanation in which he back-peddles and tries to shift the emphasis onto the Pentagon’s policies (see statement and GNN discussion here). But he fails to disown the thrust of the original argument: those who take part in an evil capitalist system should be held accountable, like Adolf Eichmann was. Eichmann was the mild-mannered German bureaucrat who designed the plans for carrying out the Holocaust. He was famously captured by Israel in 1960, tried for his crimes and hanged. His everyman demeanor prompted Hannah Arendt to coin the term “the banality of evil.”
The storm around Churchill’s statements has many on the far left coming to his defense. As a Native American activist, he has a long record of fighting injustice (see my interview with his frequent co-author Jim Vander Wall here), and I too support his right to free speech. Ruffling feathers is what good professors do. It’s a shame that the controversy has cost him his chairmanship of the Ethnic Studies Department at Colorado (he resigned this week). Now his troubles have reached all the way to New York, where an appearance at Hamilton College was cancelled due to what administrators said were security concerns over a flood of death threats.
But there’s a big difference between the right to speak your mind, and being right. And I think he’s dead wrong.
Maybe it’s because I was blocks away when the towers fell. Maybe it’s because I’m more of a wussy pacifist than my more radical brothers. But I cannot find it in me to find what he wrote anything other than completely reprehensible.
Consider the professor’s twisted logic. First one has to ignore the fact that the main crime he accuses the U.S. of – the embargo of Iraq under Saddam which resulted in hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths – was an act of the U.S. government and was likely unpopular, as most limits on commerce are, with the financial community. Let’s grant him that the bankers are complicit in America’s global corporate domination. We can all agree on that. But where do you draw the line when it comes to doling out the professor’s brand of tough justice? What about the secretaries who serve coffee to the little Eichmanns? They keep the evil system caffeinated, should they die? What if you own stock? Does earning dividends on GE mean your apartment building should be leveled with you in it? What if you keep your money at Chase or Citibank? Buy stuff at Wal-Mart? Pay federal taxes? Or better yet, what if you work for the government? Churchill himself works for a state university. He takes a paycheck from an institution that in all likelihood does military research and is probably ten times more complicit in the actual machinery of war than any junior currency trader.
If Churchill’s intent was to merely challenge us – to get us to look in the mirror and ask if maybe we all have a little Eichmann in us, then I applaud him. In some ways, we all do – no matter how hard we try to buy recycled toilet paper or not to buy Air Jordans. As Americans, we are all complicit in varying degrees in an exploitative system. It’s the acknowledgment of my special responsibility as a privileged person on this planet that keeps me doing what I’m doing. But Churchill, no matter how he later tried to spin it, was clearly trying to do something more than “shock the yuppies.” He was pinning a target on the backs of a very specific group of people, the “technocrats,” and saying they deserved what they got that clear September morning. It was a vicious, sloppy polemic that he deserves to be called out on. To argue that a commodities trader (which many WTC victims were) deserves to pay with his life for buying pork bellies low and selling them high is simplistic, unprogressive, and I dare say, fascist – even if, as he later tried to argue, he was merely applying America’s standards back on itself.
It’s a shame to see such a great champion of the repressed as Ward Churchill succumb to such wrongheaded logic – the very logic that has led to the belief that certain groups of people could be annihilated for their perceived complicity in the acts of the larger group.
Anthony Lappé (anthony (at) gnn.tv) is GNN's Executive Editor. He is the co-author with Stephen Marshall of GNN's first book, True Lies, and the producer of GNN's award-winning Iraq documenatry, BattleGround: 21 Days on the Empire's Edge. Check out his blog, The Bunker, at http://www.gnn.tv/users/user.php?id=3 |
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Ward Churchill: Embarrassment or Cop? You decide... |
by via Dose of Reality
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
05 Feb 2005
|
I will not try to sort this all out, but Churchill has some heavy and unexplained baggage that he has picked up over the years. Even his status as a Native American seems to be disputable. Are his embarassing mis-steps just a personal burden -- or are they part of some bigger plan that Churchill is just a bit player in?
Dose
From:
http://newswire.indymedia.org/en/newswire/2005/02/818551.shtml
Ward CHurchill the Cop Unravels finally!! The Ketoowah Band of Cherokee says "He is not a member of our tribe".
Ogitichida (AIM WARRIORS) 04 Feb 2005 02:04 GMT
Ward said "I am enrolled Ketoowah Cherokee". The Ketoowah Band say's "He is not enrolled". Ward's best friend Russ Means supported Republican John Thune in recent South Dakota race. No eyebrows raised? Russ and Ward openly suported the CIA backed COntras? No eyebrows raised? Now the truth comes out.Ward's statements about 911 crafted by the FBI to get AIM back on the "Most Wanted"
AIM disputed these comments when they were first made no one listened. We said to Ward "Are the janitors,watresses, and low wage workers in the tower Eichmanns?" Ward it is time for you to chose. Lose your cushy US government backed job and sink into the drarkness like Doug Durham (FBI informant) did before you or reveal your true identity. White boy grew upo in Chmpagne Illinois son of the two nicest white folks you could ever meet. Volunteered to two terms in Vietnam as MILITARY INTELLIGENCE (NO EYEBROWS RAISED?) who roomded with Mark Clark in the month he was murdered by police alongside Fred Hampton. WHo was never discharged from the military. Who was a writer for the right wing mag "Soldier of Fortune" and then claimed he was infitrating them (for who Ward for who?!!).
The man who claimed to be indian but never bothered to live in an Indian community. The man who we have on tape threatening the lives of 70 year old AIM founders. The man who supported the (CIA backed) Contras openly during the 80's. The man who did press conferences in front of FBI Denver headquarters to call AIM founders murderers and who is in love with right wing Russ Means. Russ who rently said " a woman cannot lead the Lakota Nation" as a failed campaign theme in November. Meanwhile Russ openly supported John Thune for Congress the Bush heir apparent to Daschle's seat. Ward Churchill the man who taught classes for the South Dakota State Police in the late seventies that were in Ward's own words "were called art history but were really an orientation into AIM".
Amazing the racist whites who still are here to tell us who our leaders are even though News from Indian Country, the Ketoowah Band of Cherokee, the founders of the American Indian Movement, and every reputable voice in Indian Country have said "HE IS NOT ONE OF US"! White more radical than thou assholes tell us who our leaders are. Ward is and weill always be a sabateur of Indian resistance. His stupid fucking Eichmann comments were designed by the agency to get AIM back on "the list". Ward Churchill is nothing more than smoke and mirror sunglsses fading into nothing. Maybe he will go back to Viet Nam and kill some more of those beautiful anti-imperialist souls as he happily did as a god damn volunteer.
Ward it is a beautiful touch for them to have you go out like this. Pretending it was because you were too radical while all the time you run with the Contra dog Means. It ain't over Ward not by a long shot resigning and going away to drink Scotch with the boys at the bureau while you wait for a new assignment? We will uncover you and bring your charade to light no matter where you slink off to.
To Indy Media. You folks are nice well intending folks but you have got to get the story straight. AIM has never been divided the founders were Dennis Banks and Clyde Bellecourt (according to even Ward). Russ left AIM to support the CIA, Ward was assigned to be his little attache' as he stabbed his own brother Bill Means in the back, testified to grand juries against AIM members etc... Meanwhile Ward used Russ for the only shread of legitimacy he ever had in Indian Country. Russ is a laughing stock and so is Ward. No native people claim Ward. Period. His books make the heroes and heroines out to be the villains and the villains out to be the heroes. That is ihis job. Ward wrote the only division there ever was in AIM and white folks believed it. The boy can tell a good story though. This much is true.
Attached is a hiarious press release where Russ wanted to open a liqour store just outside the Rez to raise money for an Alchohol treatment Center. yadayadayada
[article.homepage.prefix]: http://www.AIMOVEMENT.org
From:
http://newswire.indymedia.org/en/newswire/2005/02/818553.shtml
Ward Churchill: Fuck 'im
Nobody 04 Feb 2005 02:45 GMT
The left shouldn't waste it's breath defending this guy. He's a fake and a provocateur.
Link to AIM documents on Ward Churchill included.
http://www.aimovement.org/csi/Churchill/
This fellow has been going around for years claiming he's an Indian, although he can't quite make up his mind what tribe. He isn't enrolled in any tribe, though he sometimes says he is, and he doesn't seem to have any Indian relatives, except some in-laws.
He served in Vietnam as a public information specialist, which, as I understand it, is a kind of propagandist. He went on to work for Soldier of Fortune Magazine, a far-right publication with close ties to mercenaries, the special forces and various intelligence agencies, before deciding he was a radical Indian.
AIM reports that his main goals when they knew him seem to have been to disrupt, cause trouble, and red-bait. Here's some red-baiting, if you like:
http://www.aimovement.org/csi/Churchill/means_churchill_10_6__86_01.jpg
His most important policy stance was against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua.
They tried for years to reach out to him, but each time they stuck their hand out he smacked it.
Now they say he's a provocateur. They know him, and they're trustworthy, and if they say it, well, he probably is.
Also, his position is not one we need to defend. He dishonestly has decided to deny it now, but he actually stood up in favor of the September 11 attacks. That is an indefensible position, and an amazingly irresponsible thing for someone of his education and experience to say.
Also notice that it forecloses any debate about who the real authors of the 9/11 attacks were. While it appears that the named hijackers were probably flying the planes, there is very good reason to think that the U.S. government and possibly others were complicit in the mass murder committed that day.
In closing, here is what I would say to anyone who asked me about Ward Churchill: "Well, you know, he's a nutball. He's been known around the left as a nutball for a good, long time. But, even a nutball is entitled to free speech. And if they went around firing college professors for being jackasses, well, where would that leave us really?"
As for the 9/11 attacks, I truly think Amiri Baraka got it about right:
http://www.amiribaraka.com/blew.html |
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More on Ward Churchill |
by via Dose of Reality
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
05 Feb 2005
|
Unike AIM, I am troubled be the implications for academic freedom posed by the attack on Churchill. The attack in this piece below on Fred Hoxie is questionablle. But it's hard to defend the man, rather than the principle, when you're talking about Churchill. I am very interested in the opinions of those who may know more about this. Something just doesn't add up in this situation
Dose
From:
http://newswire.indymedia.org/en/newswire/2005/02/818626.shtml
AIM Communique on Ward Churchill
Ogithida- American Indian Movent 04 Feb 2005 23:41 GMT
This is a summary of our communique on recent Churchill events. He may have a right to say what he is saying but we have a right to say his positions are not in keeping with our position and once again and since 1985 he is not a part of the American Indian Movement.
AMERICAN INDIAN MOVEMENT GRAND GOVERNING COUNCIL
MINISTRY FOR INFORMATION
P.O. Box 13521
Minneapolis MN 55414
612/ 721-3914 . fax 612/ 721-7826
Email: aimggc (at) worldnet.att.net
Web Address: www.aimovement.org
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Ward Churchill was scheduled to speak at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York on February 3, 2005. His appearance was canceled by the college after he caused a public furor over his loathsome remarks about the 9-11 tragedy in New York. AIM's Grand Governing Council has been dealing with Churchill's hateful attitude and rip-off of Indian people for years.
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The American Indian Movement Grand Governing Council representing the National and International leadership of the American Indian Movement once again is vehemently and emphatically repudiating and condemning the outrageous statements made by academic literary and Indian fraud, Ward Churchill in relationship to the 9-11 tragedy in New York City that claimed thousands of innocent people’s lives.
Churchill’s statement that these people deserved what happened to them, and calling them little Eichmanns, comparing them to Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, who implemented Adolf Hitler’s plan to exterminate European Jews and others, should be condemned by all.
The sorry part of this is Ward Churchill has fraudulently represented himself as an Indian, and a member of the American Indian Movement, a situation that has lifted him into the position of a lecturer on Indian activism. He has used the American Indian Movement’s chapter in Denver to attack the leadership of the official American Indian Movement with his misinformation and propaganda campaigns.
Ward Churchill has been masquerading as an Indian for years behind his dark glasses and beaded headband. He waves around an honorary membership card that at one time was issued to anyone by the Keetoowah Tribe of Oklahoma. Former President Bill Clinton and many others received these cards, but these cards do not qualify the holder a member of any tribe. He has deceitfully and treacherously fooled innocent and naĂŻve Indian community members in Denver, Colorado, as well as many other people worldwide. Churchill does not represent, nor does he speak on behalf of the American Indian Movement.
New York’s Hamilton College Kirklands Project should be aware that in their search for truth and justice, the idea that they have hired a fraud to speak on Indian activism is in itself a betrayal of their goals.
Dennis J. Banks, Ojibwa Nation
Chairman of the Board
American Indian Movement
Phone: 218-654-5885
Nee Gon Nway Wee Dung, aka, Clyde H. Bellecourt, Ojibwa Nation
National Executive Director
American Indian Movement
Cell: 612-251-5836
Office: 612-724-3129
Press Contact:
WaBun-Inini, aka, Vernon Bellecourt, Ojibwa Nation
Executive Committee Member
Director Council on Foreign Relations
American Indian Movement
Office: 612-721-3914
Cell: 612-889-0796
Churchill's membership in tribe honorary only
By Stuart Steers,
Rocky Mountain News
February 4, 2005
The former chairman of the Keetoowah band of Cherokee Indians says University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill was given an honorary membership that required no proof of Cherokee heritage.
John Ross led the tribe for several years in the 1990s. He says the Keetoowah established an "associate member" program to recognize friends of the tribe.
"If somebody helped out in a certain way, to honor them they'd give them an associate membership," Ross said Thursday. "There were 300 or 400 associate members."
Former President Clinton also was given an honorary membership in the tribe.
To be a full-fledged member of the Keetoowah, a person has to prove he or she is at least one-fourth Cherokee. Churchill has never had such a membership. Only full members are allowed to vote, hold office and receive tribal privileges.
Churchill has cited his associate membership in the tribe as proof of his Cherokee roots. He told The Denver Post on Wednesday he is three-sixteenths Cherokee. In the past, he has described himself as one-sixteenth Cherokee and also claimed to have Creek Indian blood. Ross said Churchill came to several Keetoowah celebrations in the early 1990s and befriended tribal members, who decided they wanted to give him the associate membership.
"He told the tribal council that if they needed him to lend a hand, he would," Ross said. He recalls Churchill offering to represent the tribe at an academic forum sponsored by the University of Arkansas.
Eventually, Ross came to feel the associate membership program was being abused, and he asked the tribal council to abolish it. The Keetoowah haven't given out any new associate memberships since 1994.
"There were a lot of people coming in and trying to use the associate memberships to elevate themselves," he said. "We decided we shouldn't give them out anymore and did away with it."
Ross said some of the associate members were people who started claiming to be Keetoowah artisans. He says Churchill is also misusing his associate membership status.
"In a sense, he's misleading people," Ross said. "He's like the others - that's what he's done."
Churchill did not return numerous phone calls during the past two days seeking comment.
Many non-Indians are now claiming Cherokee ancestry, said Richard Allen, a policy analyst with the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma. The Keetoowah are a small offshoot of the much larger Cherokee Nation.
Allen has worked for the Cherokee Nation for more than 20 years. He said he has followed Churchill's career for much of that time.
"When it comes to Churchill, I've always thought he was a wannabe Indian," Allen said. "His history is a little bit like Forrest Gump."
Allen said Churchill picked up a packet to enroll in the Cherokee Nation in 1991 and never returned it.
November 3, 1999
BACKGROUND: The United States Government War
Against the American Indian Movement
On December 17-18, 1993 a group of suspected government agents, co-conspirators, collaborators, and a few unsuspecting pawns and dupes convened a meeting at Edgewood, New Mexico under the banner of the so-called "confederation of autonomous AIM" chapters and released the Edgewood declaration in which they launched their attack on the legitimate leadership of the American Indian Movement.
This declaration was signed by Russell Means, Glen Morris, Bob Robideaux and David Hill. In addition to these individuals we find at the heart of this conspiracy Ward Churchill, Bobby Castille, George Martin, Donald Grinde Jr., Paulette d’ Autueil, M. Annette Jaimes, Nantinki Rose and Robert (Bob) Roche. We believe that Joe D. Locust, Sr., Dianne Million, Sharon Venne and Regina Brave Dixon are unsuspecting dupes who have allowed themselves to be used by these conspirators (see Susan Shown Harjo letter). Faith Townsend Attaglia of Dark Night Field Notes), Shelly Davis, and Bill Lawrence, owner and publisher of the so-called Native American Press in Minnesota, along with reporters, Gary Blair and Joe G. Geshick are co-conspirators, and are directly connected to this misinformation campaign. (Joe G. Geshick was in attendance at the mock tribunal).
In addition, Bill Lawrence and his newspaper have aligned themselves with the likes of Bud Grant, Howard Hansen and other individuals and organizations like CERA, Citizens Equal Rights Association, PERM, PARR, etc., which by their words and deeds have proven themselves to be anti-Indian, anti-Indian Nation Sovereignty and anti-Treaty Rights, which includes the spiritual, cultural, social, economic, and political rights of our Indian peoples. (See lawsuit, V. Bellecourt v. Lawrence & Geshick)
On March 25-26, 1994 at San Luis Obispo Community College in California this fraudulent group staged an event that was characterized by Northern California respresentative and founding board member of the American Indian Movement Grand Governing Council, Carol Standing Elk, as a mock tribunal. These two events were the continuation of a covert program which originated during the Nixon White House in 1972, and continues today on the internet (see Council on Security and Intelligence).
These co-conspirators calling themselves the confederation of autonomous AIM chapters have attempted to infiltrate, misdirect, divide, disrupt and cause confusion by claiming to be American Indian Movement on the one hand, and on the other hand they continue their campaign to vilify and discredit the legitimate leadership, and members of the American Indian Movement Grand Governing Council as part of their campaign to destroy the American Indian Movement.
Previous to the March 25-26, 1994 mock tribunal held at San Luis Obispo Community College, a meeting was called in Minneapolis, Minnesota attended by 250 men, women, and children responding to a tobacco invitation. They gathered in spirituality and consultation on Sunday, March 20, 1994 and included elders, spiritual leaders and ten pipe carriers. They spoke of the Movement's history and these attacks against the Movement and leaders, Clyde and Vernon Bellecourt.
Spiritual leaders of the Midewin and Sun Dance ways advised Clyde and Vernon not to respond to the attacks against them, and not to travel to the sham "tribunal" to defend themselves, and to ignore the false charges. In reference to those who are making charges and bringing false "indictments," one elder advised Clyde, "Let them speak, and let them say all they will say, and when they are done, they will have no more to say."
However, on Friday, March 25 and Saturday, March 26, leaders of the national and local American Indian Movement met together in San Francisco to strategize how to deal with Ward Churchill and a self-styled radical faction of his followers. Present at the meeting were AIM National President and co-founder, Clyde Bellecourt; AIM National Board Member and Northern California AIM Director, Carol Standing Elk; Southern California AIM Director, Fern Mathias; California AIM Publicist, Patti Jo King; long-time AIM affiliate, Floyd Red Crow Westerman; International Indian Treaty Council President, William Means; and IITC Information Director, Yvonne Swan. They were accompanied by Anishinabe spiritual leader Ellie Favel who carried with her a sacred medicine bundle, and an urgent message from the gathering of traditional spiritual leaders in Minnesota.
The group gathered to discuss their concerns regarding a defamatory "tribunal" in which distinguished Indian leaders of national and local Indian organizations were "put on trial" and condemned by a radical group of self-styled "Indian activists" falsely claming to be members of the American Indian Movement, and spearheaded by ring leader Ward Churchill.
While it was seen as one last effort to reason with those Indian and non-Indian friends that were being manipulated by these conspirators, we are again reminded of the advice of our elder who said, "Let them speak, let them say all they will say, and when they are done, they will have no more to say."
The American Indian Movement Grand Governing Council has allowed them to have their say going back to September 23, 1986 when Ward Churchill and Glen Morris were expelled from the International Indian Treaty Council (IITC). After seven (7) more years of investigations by our Council on Security, and attempts to reason with Russell Means, who continues to be aligned with them and is a central figure in this conspiracy, Ward Churchill and Glen Morris were expelled from the American Indian Movement on November 24, 1993. Six years later in 1999 they continue their misinformation campaign and attacks against the leadership of the American Indian Movement on the Internet.
Their deceitful method of operation becomes clear and are listed as follows:
Their web site is a perfect example. They list issues as their own that the American Indian Movement, International Indian Treaty Council and other organizations have been developing over a thirty-year period of time.
They list as related sites various well known organizations and individuals and projects in order to cloak their misinformation campaigns with legitimacy.
Specifically, in regards to the revisionist writings of Ward Churchill, Glen Morris and Russell Means, they often use people such as Vine Deloria, LaDonna Harris, Gerry Spence, Noam Chomsky and many other Indian and non-Indian intellectuals and academics, some who naively play into their game plan.
Working with willing agents like Santos "Hawks Blood" Suarez, and Lawrence Sampson and others, they are attempting to sell for money chapters of so-called confederation of autonomous AIM and AIM club membership cards.
They continue to perpetuate this misinformation campaign in front-operations like Dark Night Field Notes, using well-known persons like Noam Chomsky, Eddie Hatcher, Winona LaDuke, and others on their advisory board. They are now putting out the same misinformation on the Internet (see letterhead and Dark Night Field Notes by Faith Attaglia, and Chomsky, LaDuke letters), also (See Bob Brown, AAPRP letter).
They use publications like Houghton-Mifflin, Random House Publishers, South End Press, and Speak Out Speakers Bureau who allow Ward Churchill and others to perpetuate their literary, academic, and Indian fraud on the unknown public.
In order to carry out this cruel hoax, they are deceitful and treacherous to the point that they will always surround themselves with innocent and naĂŻve individuals out of the Indian and non-Indian communities, some who are well known who actually have endorsed their revisionist, inaccurate, shoddy, and fraudulent writings. The result of this is that without review of the contents of their publications, Indian and non-Indian educators and educational institutions and libraries are using these books in their curriculum. In doing so, they and our students become victims of this fraud. 8. Using the American Indian Movement to give themselves credibility, cover and access, they have been able to infiltrate other organizations and movements nationally and internationally.
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What you can do to help:
The American Indian Movement Grand Governing Council urges our friends and supporters worldwide to expose and isolate these conspirators expeditiously.
We request that educators, Indian and non-Indians alike remove from their curriculums and libraries all of their revisionist, inaccurate and shoddy writings, and send them back to their publishers (a clear example of the problem is the Encyclopedia of the North American Indian by Frederick E. Hoxie, published by Houghton Mifflin, a subsidiary of Random House). Mr. Marc Jaffe of Houghton Mifflin first contacted and met with Tim Giago, Oglala Lakota, and award winning publisher of Indian Country Today, and syndicated columnist to do the book, and without notifying Mr. Giago, Mr. Jaffe selected Mr. Hoxie who allowed Indian literary and academic fraud, Churchill to submit the article, "Radicals and Radicalism, 1990 to the Present." Everyone knows that Mr. William A. Means has provided key leadership in the development of the International Indian Treaty Council from its inception in 1974 to the present. IITC is the international political and diplomatic corp of the American Indian Movement, yet, Churchill gives credit to fellow wannabe Jimmy Durham, and Winona LaDuke. No doubt Churchill's motives in his revisionist writings in omitting William A. Means is because of the 1986 letter in which Mr. Means expelled both Churchill and Glen Morris from further association with IITC.
Discontinue utilizing Speak Out Speakers Bureau and publications from South End Press, Zeta Magazine and Common Courage Press until they agree to stop promoting these frauds. Additionally, do now allow Native American Press to be circulated in your place of business or community.
Join with us in demanding that the Senate Judiciary Committee hold Waco and Ruby Ridge-type hearings on the Pine Ridge Oglala Lakota Nation; the site of Wounded Knee 1890-1973, and the botched FBI operation that left FBI agents, Williams and Coler and AIM member, Joe Stuntz dead. An FBI operation that led to the deaths of Anna Mae Aquash, Buddy Lamont, Frank Clearwater, and Pedro Bissonette to name a few of many, and Leonard Peltier remains in prison after twenty-three years.
We request that organizations such as the National Indian Education Association and the American Indian Higher Education Consortium create a watchdog-type agency to review what books are being published by these literary, academic, and Indian frauds so that their revisionist writings are not finding their way into our education curriculum. This problem is of epidemic proportions, and must be stopped.
Join with us in our demands that the 6,000 pages currently under a national security cover be released to Leonard Peltier’s attorneys.
Those persons whose names appear on the Freedom of Information (FOI) declassified documents are all targets of the U.S. government war against the American Indian Movement; you should request your files from the various government agencies.
For information on how to make a Freedom of Information file request, write, fax, or email to the attention of Joslyn Kaye at the Center for Constitutional Rights
666 Broadway, 7th Floor, New York NY 10012. Email is jkaye (at) ccr-ny.org
Telephone number is 212-614-6464, ext. 470. Fax is 212-614-6499.
AIM's statement on 911
PRESS RELEASE BY THE
American Indian Movement Grand Governing Council
The American Indian Movement Peace Statement
September 15, 2001
The American Indian Movement Grand Governing Council vehemently condemns the recent acts of violence and terrorism perpetrated against innocent civilians in the United States. We condemn similar acts of violence and terrorism perpetrated by all governments and organizations against innocent civilians worldwide.
THE AMERICAN INDIAN MOVEMENT GRAND GOVERNING COUNCIL DECLARES:
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On Sunday, September 16, 2001 at 3:00 p.m. central time, Indian people will be standing with thousands of Minnesotans at the State Capitol to join our prayers and spirit in the wake of these horrific and tragic events. We request that all of our Indian peoples and others join us in our offerings and prayers at this time.
Our hearts go out to the victims and their families, and we mourn with them the loss of their loved ones. As a people who have historically suffered similar crimes against humanity perpetrated against peaceful Indian villages in the North America, and continuing today against Indian civilians in several countries of Central and South America, we nonetheless at this time grieve and join our prayers and spirits with the families of the innocent victims of these acts of violence in New York City, Pennsylvania, and Washington D.C.
However, we caution and remind the U.S. Government leaders that all faiths of the world are taught that violence begets violence. Mahatma Ghandi, and Martin Luther King, Jr. have proven the power of non-violence. Our great chiefs like Blackhawk and Chief Joseph, in the face of great adversity, were men of peace and non-violence. Blackhawk, who correctly observed at that time, when he asked the question, "Why is it that you Americans always insist on taking with a gun what you could have through love?"
With acts of love, we can become the most respected government and people in the world, and we will prevail. If we continue the cycles of violence, we will continue to be the most despised in many parts of the world, and we will fail. We must continue to pray for justice and world peace.
CONTACT:
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Ne-Gon-We-Way-We-Dun, Anishinabe Ojibwe Nation
Also known as Clyde H. Bellecourt
Phone: 612-724-3129
National Director American Indian Movement
[article.email.prefix]: AIMGGC (at) worldnet.att.net <AIMGGC (at) worldnet.att.net [article.homepage.prefix]: http://www.aimovement.org [article.phone.prefix]: 612-721-3914 |
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Re: Ward Churchill responds to attacks... |
by Joe Futrelle
futrelle (nospam) shout.net (verified) |
Current rating: 0
05 Feb 2005
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Dose, this is fascinating stuff. Thanks |
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Ward Churchill and the Contras, the CIA, and Elliot Abrams - A blow by blow of Ward's Treachery |
by repost by Dose of Reality
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
07 Feb 2005
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Ken Lawrence, former writer of Covert Action while Ward worked there, gives a blow by blow of Ward's support of the CIA and Contras in Niaragua.
I confess to having thought that a political introduction was a courtesy in an unsolicited communication. I bear no responsibility for Louis's post of my e-mail on this list, which he then attacked as though I had posted theinformation myself, and some others also have done. Inadvertently, I got under Louis's skin. He professes to relish that as sport when he can inflict it on others, but turns nasty and irrational when it happens to him.Louis manages to see the clay feet on everyone else's radical heroes, with which I concurred generally, and added a few points to his, in a private communication. But the purpose of my e-mail was to note for his benefit, in the event he had not been aware of it, that Ward Churchill, the hero of his own post, also has clay feet.
I wrote as someone who had worked with Ward on a number of projects over a decade's time, always cordially, though in later years our disagreements strained our ability to unite on the political field of struggle. Ward and I discussed and debated our differences at his home, his office, at public forums, and on the telephone. When I objected to Ward that his book on Marxism was a caricature, he replied that perhaps it was, but it reported on Marxistsas he knew them.
By the mid-1980s, Ward regarded CISPES as his main political enemy in Boulder and Denver. I was heavily involved in solidarity work with the FMLN, and sanctuary support, which included speaking/organizing engagements in Colorado. As far as I could tell, Ward's hostility to the FMLN was derivative, becauseof its political alliance with Sandinista Nicaragua. To my knowledge, no indigenous Salvadorans were oppressed or politically mistreated by the FMLN or by any of its constituent parties.
At about that time, Ward condemned the American Indian Movement leadership --specifically Bill Means and Vernon Bellecourt by name -- as stooges of the left (his words, not mine). Ward and his supporters set up Colorado AIM toadvance their political agenda. So much for Louis's assertion that "There is no other activist/intellectual in the American Indian movement who is more resolutely opposed to capitalism than Ward Churchill." Of necessity, many of us who personally deplored the split in AIM nevertheless were obliged to work politically with Colorado AIM on solidarity issues of great importance. (Louis's vain boast of being the only Marxist supporter of indigenous people and their struggles is so much wind.)
In this arena, the culture of machismo cast a pall over much of the work, as women were assigned menial tasks but excluded from the circle where decisions were taken. One woman raised a fuss; I concurred with her point; Ward sought to put out the fire, but without implementing change at the top. I hope that things have improved in the decade since.
On the national level, Ward and I continued to collaborate on issues of agreement, particularly political repression in the United States. I had developed a considerable body of information on Jill and Gi Shafer, the FBI (and CIA, according to one reporter who interviewed Gi Schafer long afterward) provocateurs at Wounded Knee, much of it learned from Joe Burton, a self-confessed undercover FBI spy who had targeted my work in a small way, but had worked throughout the U.S. and Canada with the Shafers to set up phony communist collectives under FBI control. (Nearly all had Red in the title --Red Star Cadre, Red Sun, Red Collective, and so forth.)
Ward and Ken Tilsen had information on Doug Durham and others who had caused similar damage.Our disagreements were acknowledged with uneasy humor. Ward would call to tease/taunt me -- for example, about his meeting with Brooklyn Rivera and Eliott Abrams ("What will our CovertAction friends say about that?" he mocked) and about his barroom encounters with Robert K. Brown. I baited him back ("If Roxanne was bad to rat on her comrades to a HUAC investigator, how can you justify your hat-in-hand meeting with the most enthusiastic war criminal inWashington?"). If anyone knows a better way to function under difficult circumstances, I'm all ears.
Louis denies that Ward chose to ally with the CIA, but ended up on the CIA's side by virtue of his support to the Miskito struggle. The latter point is true, but -- once more for effect -- Ward eventually penned (with Glenn Morris) a political justification for alliance with the CIA, using the Hmong people of Laos as his principal example. If Louis hasn't read the Cultural Survival article, he should read it before he comments further. If he has read it, his postings here are dishonest.
Although Louis states that the Miskito alliance with the CIA was a mistake, Ward and Glenn argued the opposite, following the Laotian example.
Earlier, at the Boulder anti-apartheid teach-in, Ward had proposed that he and I debate our differences. It was after the CS article appeared that I renewed the proposal to hold a public debate. I asserted the necessity of anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism as the central political ingredients of liberation; Ward and Glenn rejected them. Glenn offered to provide a platform for the debate, which never occurred. After the Sandinista defeat, there was scant political interest in Denver or Boulder, but I still proposed to write and publish it. Ward was willing; unfortunately, our editor was not.
In the years since, we have drifted apart, and have not remained in touch. Nevertheless, despite our fierce differences, I have always regarded Ward as a friend and as I reconstructed these events, find that I still do.
Now back to the beginning: Ward and I met shortly after he had published his insider account of Soldier of Fortune magazine in the political journal on Africa published at DU, whose title I have forgotten. Louis asks for the facts; he should look up that article. I do not have access to my Mississippi archive at this time. Besides those details, which are politically valuable, I asked Ward how he had taken such a revolting job in the first place. Ward is a professional graphic artist of outstanding talent, as anyone familiar with his work will attest.
In an encounter with SoF's owner/publisher/editor Robert K. Brown, Ward told Brown that his magazine was ugly and amateurish. Brown offered him a job to spruce up and professionalize SoF, which Ward accepted. According to Ward, their political differences were known to both (specifically, Ward's association with SDS in the sixties, and Brown's work as a CIA asset), but they both enjoyed the military-macho banter that defined the magazine's culture, and continued to relate on that level even long after Ward had published his kiss-and-tell exposé.
This was in the mid-1970s, when both Ward and I were working, in very different political arenas, to thwart CIA mercenary recruitment, in solidarity with Angola and with the Zimbabwe liberation movement. Any time I was in the vicinity of Denver or Boulder, he helped set up speaking opportunities.As I recall, the last time he did so was in the fall of 1983, shortly beforemy trip to Nicaragua. Ward and other friends organized several meetings for me, including one at which I was scheduled to debate Brown and Gen. John Singlaub. Their agreed participation could only have been arranged by Ward, but in the end Brown and Singlaub backed out. (Singlaub's secretary attended my talk at UCD, presumably to gather intelligence for her boss.) The closest we came to an actual debate occurred when Brown called a radio talk show that hosted my appearance, with this remark about the previous several weeks'events: "His guys got our guys in Beirut, but our guys got his guys in Grenada."
At that time, Ward was warmly encouraging of my visit to Nicaragua as a member of an Oxfam delegation. One person I met at Puerto Cabezas was the then editor of Navajo Times, Mark Trahant (I hope I'm recalling his name correctly), who had toured the entire Atlantic Coast war zone without a Sandinista escort, and wrote his report upon his return. Both of us agreed that the Sandinistas had made dreadful political mistakes, but that they had recognized this, apologized, and honestly sought to make amends, the results of which were palpable everywhere we went.
Another was Roxanne Dunbar, then a Sandinista publicist, whose account did not differ significantly from Trahant's. Meanwhile, the contra Miskitos were directing their war efforts against the radical pro-Sandinista Indians, clinics, agricultural co-operatives, and other manifestations of modernity and reconstruction, and torching whole villages (our group visited Sukat Pin after such an attack, and while another was in progress a mile or so away) while seeking allies among the older, traditional leaders. Trahant's serialized Navajo Times report bears study by any radical who wishes to discuss this issue honestly and intelligently.
Upon my return, Ward and I had detailed discussions of all this. Ward said that he had been asked by Tomás Borge to mediate an accord with the Miskito insurgents, based on the program that Louis professes to have been correct. Initially, Ward agreed, but later changed his position. Although embarrassed by Russ Means's declaration that he was going to Nicaragua "to kill a Sandinista," and his false charge that Borge had ordered the Sandinista army "to shoot the Indians out of the trees like they shoot monkeys," Ward's Colorado AIM backed and publicized the Means/Morris military adventure, which had been funded by the Moonie ultra-right front, CAUSA.
That brings me full circle. Having no ability to respond politically to my points, Louis attacked me for reporting my political experiences as an indulgence. Evidently he prefers Web-site Marxism/indigenism derived from the experiences of strangers. My teachers taught that our duty was to join the struggles of workers and oppressed people, and to report on them that they may be propagated. I have done my best to live up to that. With Rosa Luxemburg, I believe that the mistakes of a truly revolutionary proletariat (and of the oppressed) are more valuable and more instructive than the finest decisions of the most excellent central committee.
With AntonioGramsci, I believe that the greatest barrier to socialist revolution is not the armed might of the state and the ruling class -- though that is capitalism's ultimate prop, after the initial barrier is breached -- but rather the ruling class culture and world view that has been internalized by workers and oppressed people.
As for the extended narrative I have presented here, no one needs to take my word for anything. Though Ward and I have not spoken in many years, it would surprise me if he would fail to verify my factual account. To be sure, he would have a robustly different political perspective on these events, and perhaps on his movement's strategy. Others who participated in many of these struggles include such Colorado activists as Larry Mosqueda (no longer there, but still engaged in struggle), Priscilla Falcon, Ricardo Romero, Kiko Martinez, Lowell May, Elaine Heinrichs, and Jim and Jenny van der Wall.
Perhaps even Louis will eventually be able to manage the more complex, contradictory, and ambiguous nuances of real revolutionary struggle, after his next political conversion. He seems to have defined his political career by those phases, which accounts for his knee-jerk retort to my simile of Trotskyism. Lest he get away with that remark, I close with this: By the time C.L.R. James came to dwell in Chicago, where I lived and worked in the 1960s, the term Troskyist was as perjorative for him as my usage that caused Louis to smart -- like a towel snapped on his bum, I guess. The more things change . ..Ken Lawrence
http://newswire.indymedia.org/en/newswire/2005/02/818670.shtml |
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