Six years after the bloody fact, I am still trying to understand September 11. I don’t understand how 19 men could callously murder so many people. It was not a crime of passion, but a crime of calculation. It was more than revenge.
Osama Bin Laden’s latest video does nothing to clear things up. His soliloquy was a series of poorly reasoned rants. He is a conspiracy theorist and a reactionary.
It’s comical, really. A look at the rather hard-to-find transcript of the video, released Friday, shows why.
Bin Laden opens with some religious prattle about the eye-for-an-eye doctrine that is favored among jihadists as well as, more disturbingly, many Americans in reaction to the attacks of September 11, whose solemn anniversary we remember today.
The grizzled old killer, now sporting a frisky new beard – it appears that even global superterrorists need a makeover every now and then – pitifully harkens back to his glory days, when he engineered, he all but admits, the crime against humanity that destroyed the World Trade Center. Bin Laden has little else to talk about. Our troops and even, he probably fears, the more rapacious members of his own coterie, thinking about the bounty on his head, doubtlessly make his sleep unbearably troubled at night, forcing him to keep moving from refuge to uncertain refuge.
Oddly, Bin Laden claims that the “morality and culture of the Holocaust is your [Western] culture, not our culture. In fact, burning living beings is forbidden in our religion, even if they be small like the ant, so what of man? ” Oh really? Is it Bin Laden’s argument that those killed in the September 11 attacks were not people? That is precisely what the Germans thought about those they killed during the Nazi holocaust he refers to.
It is clear that Bin Laden sees the world in terms of racial and religious identity, writ large. He assumes that we, Americans, consider the Germans of the Second World War to be our “brethren” and the Spanish of the Inquisition to be our “brothers.” Although many Americans do have European ancestors, few of us think of ourselves as anything but Americans. Cairo is just a little bit further down the road in our imaginations than the Rive Gauche. Neither place is particularly familiar.
Bin Laden makes a grand, sweeping gesture of generosity, he supposes, when he states that Muslims have not killed the Jews of Morocco or the Christians of Egypt, and, for the latter only, have no plans to do so. Such charity.
And even Bin Laden cannot help but bash the media, whom he claims has “lost its credibility and manifested itself as a tool of the colonialist empires.” Perhaps he watches Fox.
Most amusing, however, is the Bin Laden’s dissatisfaction with the Democratic-controlled Congress. It seems that even our most wanted ubervillain jumps on the Congress-trashing bandwagon. Both Americans and terrorists, in case you haven’t heard, are terribly cross at Congress these days.
He’s right that “this war [in Iraq] was entirely unnecessary,” and, hilariously, that “the leader of Texas [Bush, of course] doesn’t like those who give advice.” Equally hilarious is his insistence that the president should have listened to Noam Chomsky. Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez has been known to give Bush the same advice. Chavez should invite Bin Laden to moderate a call-in show on Telesur. They could invite Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a guest.
As others in the media have remarked, Bin Laden seems at times to be as shrill as any conspiracy-theorist blogger from the left or right. He combines Marxist ideas about capitalism with bluster about globalization. He’s even concerned about global warming and the Kyoto agreement. Good old Al Gore. That really was a rather good PowerPoint presentation.
All of these events, the attacks, America’s response, Bin Laden’s poorly reasoned motivations for the attacks, our president’s hazy goals for Afghanistan and Iraq, his conflation of 9/11 with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, all of these things are profoundly disheartening.
It would be nice to believe that we are at least, in Bin Laden, confronting a person who is rational, who can perhaps consider that he was wrong, who is not so barmy as to simply react, with lethal criminality, to any of the many supposed wrongs he sees our country having inflicted on Muslims.
And it would be nice to think that we Americans, having perfected the art of democracy as much as anyone, having a fairly enlightened view, in theory at least, of human rights, should respond in such an irresponsible way to the real and horribly tangible wrongs of Bin Laden and his acolytes. We struck out viciously in fear and anger against those who caused us pain. It was a primal response, not one suiting a nation such as ours.
As I did after the attacks occurred in 2001, I think that the only responsible and humane response to 9/11 worthy of our dignity is that advocated by Nuremberg prosecutor Ben Ferencz. His essay, “After September 11: Thoughts on What Can Be Done,” posted one week after the attacks, is worthy of the legacy of Mahatma Gandhi, of Martin Luther King Jr. It should be read by everyone and taken fully to heart.
Contrast Ferencz’s essay with Bin Laden’s latest rant, and you can easily see which man we should respond to.
Ferencz mapped out a course of action that we tragically failed to follow. He would have had the United States draw up specific indictments against Bin Laden and his co-conspirators, submit them to the governments that might be harboring the fugitives, create a military force under United Nations auspices, enforce economic and other sanctions against countries that refused to hand over suspects, and, most importantly, “the [United Nations] Security Council, following its own precedents, can quickly set up an ad hoc international criminal tribunal to try the accused – as was done with US support – for the crimes against humanity committed in Yugoslavia and Rwanda. The trials should be absolutely fair.”
This last point, having an ad hoc criminal tribunal fairly try Bin Laden and his lieutenants, is the best way forward. It is the only way, to my mind, to redeem September 11. Instead of merely shaking our heads in disbelief, sadness, and disgust at what happened on that dark day, we can remember, with satisfaction, that we showed the world that an eye for an eye is the dogma of the condemned, not of us.
We are Americans, we can say, we stand for justice and fairness, we give everyone a fair trial, no matter what their crime. We were pushed, pushed back, but then realized that an eye for an eye soon leaves everyone blind.
Ferencz offered his solution because he “experienced the horrors of war and…cannot bear to see the destruction and the pained eyes of those digging in the ruins or the helpless relatives refusing to accept what they know is now inevitable.” We have seen that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have not brought us any closer to satisfaction. We must now choose the high road, the road of progress, the road of law.
Let us bring Bin Laden to trial for everyone to see his crimes. Some will say that this will only give him an ill-deserved soapbox. This is true. He will be insistent, indignant. He might receive adoring coverage on some middle eastern television stations. But he will be exposed, and we will finally be vindicated.
And maybe late at night, after he shuffles away to his lonely cell in a maximum-security prison somewhere in the United States, he will begin to sweat as he counts out his sins in his head. And we will all begin to sleep a little easier.
Ferencz ended his essay with one of the best sentiments I have ever heard expressed. I hope we can all learn from it:
“We must try to understand the causes of the violence and try to diminish the hatreds that encourage people to kill or be killed for their particular cause. This requires new thinking, a willingness to compromise, compassion and tolerance, a greater respect for the goals set down in the UN Charter and infinite patience. I am now approaching 82 and I have not given up hope. To those of all faiths, I extend my best wishes for peace and happiness.”
