The perpetual war against one individual

Guantanamo Bay had been a scandal, albeit to most people unknown , for quite a long time, when it came into the limelight thanks to the evil genius of dirty people like Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, et alii.
Among the specious arguments brought forward to justify the ignominy of Guantanamo, in fact central to it, is what can be called the 9/11 argument.No one will question the fact that something did take place on 9/11, but what that something really is may be a slightly more difficult question to answer.The members of the Bush Administration, probably because they knew what had really taken place, and which we may have to wait some fifty years to know, were quick to assert right away, even before the smoke had subsided over the Twin towers , that Al-Qaeda was responsible for the attack. Clinton ,who was at the other extremity of the globe,in Australia , was not less prompt to assert that it all had to do with Bin Laden.How on earth he could know that may well be one of those eternal mysteries compared to which Fermat's theorem might seem mere child play.
And (almost) everyone rushed in to join the chorus;a French weekly immediately referred to a match between Allah and Jesus.Without an iota of proof, without a shred of evidence, without anything to validate any element of suspicion, the affirmation was roared that Bin Laden, Al Qaeda, the Taliban, the three being treated as if they were synonymous, were not only responsible , but guilty of the so-called 9/11 attacks.And the US government demanded that the Afghan government, which no one should lightly and casually identify with the Taliban or Al Qaeda, even if the cooperation,not to say the complicity between the then government of Afghanistan and Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and Oussama Bin Laden , cannot be overstated , hand over Mr Bin Laden.
Even in the absence of prima facie evidence or of any proof, the Afghan government did accept that Mr Bin Laden be tried ,in a neutral country,like Pakistan.But this would not satisfy the US which ,in violation of international law and of all diplomatic conventions, insisted that the head of Al Qaeda had to be delivered to them.Why they insisted only on Bin Laden is another of those mysteries whose solution may never be revealed.
Anyway, just imagine any country requiring from any other country , without offering any proof whatsoever, but on the basis on assumptions and affirmations only, that it hand over one of its nationals or residents, because he is thought to be guilty of a particularly horrendous crime;such a request would be treated with both mockery and contempt.But not so in the case of the US, presumably because the US are always so right , so just, so infallible that others are supposed to do as they say, should that imply transgressing their own national laws and international conventions, as admirably exemplified by LBJ's eloquent reply to the Greek ambassador in the US : ' Fuck you and fuck your Parliament !'
The Afghan government naturally refused; some have suggested that had they done so, this would have saved Afghanistan from an invasion.But the fact is that the US was bent, no matter what------------the same thing was to be seen shortly after in Iraq--------------, on invading that poor country.In case that strikes anybody as being mere affirmation, I'd like to understand why it may ever be necessary to invade an entire country, to indiscriminately bomb it to rubble, to murder its civil population on such a grand scale, to therein install a puppet government, to ,immediately after the invasion, shower contracts on US companies, when one is only looking for one single person.
Oh ,but the Afghan government was clearly an accomplice of Bin Laden, of Al Qaeda, and of the Taliban too, and that surely warranted some kind of action. Including action against the civil population which was hostile to Al Qaeda and the Taliban ? Including the wholesale destruction of a country ? The wrecking of its entire infrastructure notwithstanding the ensuing risk of disease and epidemics? the death of countless children, women, aged and disabled persons ?Everyone knows what a civilized person would reply.
But why would the US want to invade Afghanistan at all costs ? There are a few valid answers to this question.I'll simply state that for a country , whose history is one aggression, annexation, plunder,invasion,of imaginary enemies,the invasion of Afghanistan is to be regarded as something which is in perfect harmony with the US philosophy, which can be summed up by the words conquest ,domination ,and exploitation. For a country which believes in its manifest destiny , it is perfectly natural to ,with or without any reason, to kill other people,to bomb their countries,otr to transform them into slaves.Except for the blind, the US obviously longs for world hegemony, because US cannot think of human relations otherwise than in terms of confrontation.
What is particularly with the attack on defenseless Afghanistan is the fact , so great had been the horror inspired by 9/11, that everyone readily agreed that the US had every right to defend itself.
Was the US defending itself, was it under any kind of attack when the bombs and missiles started to rain on Kabul ? At best, if I may say so, US was retaliating, but in fact it was committing a most despicable aggression. And to justify it, the US had to pose as a victim, to amplify the disaster of 9/11, and to portray the Taliban as being the ultimate symbols of evil.Bin Laden, Al Qaeda, the Taliban being incarnations of the Devil,nothing less than the gulag of Guantanamo Bay would be necessary and appropriate to deal with them.People from the US and from elsewhere had been coaxed, convinced , coerced into thinking that Guantanamo was absolutely right, that torture , especially when applied to newly-invented categories of individuals, was totally legitimate, and that the war on terror was not a war of terror fro the domination of the planet, but a just war, and an endless one too, for the preservation of democracy and the promotion of the free market.
The war which had started as the war against one man could not be indefinitely prolonged as such;it had to evolve into a war against Al Qaeda, and more urgently,into a war against terror.But at the same time , that superlative personification of terror had to remain elusive,not to say immortal , thus rendering possible the equation between the war against one man and the war on terror, and the one between the war on terror and the war against one man.One of the corollaries of those dubious equations would be the vindication of Guantanamo,of torture, of renditions, of kidnappings, of unlawful arrests, of the large scale criminalization of would-be and likely suspects, regardless of the rule of law, the presumption of innocence, the burden of proof,etc.But then this the US, which knows no laws except that of its own whims, caprices , and obsessions.
So far, in spite of some suspects , some so-called suspects whose names have been mentioned ,amongst the authors of 9/11, prominent above all, Mohamed Atta, nothing even remotely convincing has been adduced to allow to confidently point the finger of blame to anyone whomsoever. Something did happen on 9/11;that was something horrible, though probably not more horrible than what takes place elsewhere, but whenever I think of 9/11, I tend to think of the Gulf of Tonkin incident, of Operation Mongoose, of Operation Northwoods.Everyone has been so eager to believe that Bin Laden is behind 9/11 that even if it were ,one day, proved to be true,there may well be no one to grant any credence to his guilt.
However, I don't think that Bin Laden is, directly or indirectly,linked to 9/11;I don't mean that he'd not have liked to be responsible for it.He would have certainly relished the idea and boasted about what he'd done .But that was not the case; for somebody like Bin Laden, 9/11 is something to be proud of.If he had had anything to do with it, he'd assuredly have let it be known, before going into hiding to prepare other attacks. Is it not strange that there were no other attacks after 9/11? Usually any group would have, after such a dramatic success, indulged in a string of attacks to further damage the morale of the enemy. It remains yet to be proved, but the most plausible conjecture would be that US needed to have an element of justification to start the thousand years' war, not that US really needed one, but they probably thought that it were better for them to have be it but a semblance of legitimacy.
And this semblance of legitimacy would be possible only if the attack on the US were to strike the imaginations beyond limits, to fill with unspeakable horror, and inspire a fathomless desire for revenge, precisely what 9/11 accomplished, so much so that even those who would have rejoiced to see the US in smoke and ruins acknowledged that ,after what had happened, the right to retaliate was absolutely legitimate and warranted.Since US had been attacked, since US was the victim,no matter what it decided,including all-out war against Mankind----------which,incidentally ,is precisely what US is covertly engaged in,------------would have to be approved and accepted.No less an institution than the UN, apparently created to preserve future generations from the scourge of war, was instrumentalized and made to endorse the criminal actions of US and NATO in Afghanistan.Acting ex post facto, the UN provided the stamp of legality which transforms the most illegal act into a legal and moral one, probably the darkest day so far in its history.( There was still worse to come though.)
If the US can wage a war of aggression ,of conquest and of colonial occupation and have it endorsed by the major actors on the international scene on the grounds that it had been defending itself, if it can endlessly perpetuate a war by inventing an invisible figure( in the present case, the other Bin Laden not to be identified with the real one,just as there is ,apart from the real Al Qaeda , another one which belongs more to the realm of fantasy or propaganda and the invention of which is more operational in the so-called , bogus war on terror ,)which it equates with a country, there is absolutely no reason for it to give up that line of strategy, the more so as it is reaping benefits.
The war against one person ,demonized in the extreme, is major strategic asset in that it will have people think that the war is not being waged against the people of a country, whereas the very opposite is true. Future generations will wonder how on earth people came to welcome that murderous notion of collateral victims, how they readily espoused the idea that to get rid of one person, or even of one group, it would be necessary to wipe out a whole population, to raze an entire country, to bomb its population into disease and suffering ,or out of existence.
This disgusting policy has already claimed too many victims,essentially innocent ones.It were time it were recognized for what it is : an unscrupulous trick to perpetuate war with a view to ensuring domination and hegemony.It's the entire world,including the US, which is at risk.