U.S. President George Bush, at a September 12 news conference, called the attacks "more than acts of terror, they were acts of war." Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld taped a message to U.S. troops later that day saying, "More--much more--will be asked of you in the weeks and months ahead. This is especially true of those who are in the field. We face powerful and terrible enemies, enemies we intend to vanquish."
For the first time in its 52 years of existence, the U.S.-dominated NATO alliance has invoked Article V of its charter, which says hat if one member comes under attack, all others will join in its defense. This opens the way for European imperialist governments to provide access to air space and runways, troops, equipment, and other backing for U.S. military assaults against Iraq, Afghanistan, or elsewhere in the Middle East or Near East.
Governments from that of Anthony Blair in the United Kingdom, to Ariel Sharon in Israel, and Vladimir Putin in Russia sent messages backing an aggressive response by the U.S. government. "This was an attack not just on a number of buildings in the United States of America but on the very notion of democracy," said Blair.
The Bush administration's war moves have received vocal bipartisan support from Congress, which rushed through a resolution saying the U.S. government is "entitled to respond under international law."
"I say bomb the hell out of them," said Georgia Democratic senator Zell Miller, not even stopping to say who "them" might be. "If there's collateral damage"--the U.S. government's euphemism for killing men, women, and children--"so be it. They certainly found our civilians to be expendable." And Louisiana Democratic senator John Breaux said the "war against terrorism" is "going to be the No. 1, 2, and 3 priority for [Congress] for the rest of the year." Others, from Arizona Republican John McCain to New York Democrat Hillary Clinton, chimed in offering full support to the Bush administration.
The White House is coupling preparations for military action abroad with steps to implement the "homeland defense" plan it has been putting in place for the past several years under both the Clinton and Bush administrations. For the first time in U.S. history, "homeland defense" establishes a domestic command structure to deploy the U.S. military--regular forces, the National Guard, the armed forces' secret police apparatus--at home, targeting the rights of working people.
Attack on political rights
Under the guise of "fighting terrorism," the U.S. rulers are exploiting the September 11 attacks to rationalize a new extension of the steps they have taken over the past decade to widen police powers, erode Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure, increase the use of informers and dirty tricks against opponents of government policies, and narrow the rights of the accused and convicted.
With "the unleashing of these Pearl Harbor-style bolts-from-the-blue," wrote Frank Gaffney, a former top Pentagon official, "the civil liberties and freedoms we have taken for granted for so long--and that make America the unique and great nation it is--may never be quite the same."
Playing on the reaction to the destruction and death toll that will reach into the thousands, the federal government on September 12 quickly set in motion the first of a series of FBI and SWAT-team police raids and detentions across the country and imposed stringent new checks of passengers and other travel restrictions at airports.
U.S. military forces were put on the highest state of alert. Two aircraft carriers and five destroyers and cruisers were deployed outside New York and Washington. National Guard troops were dispatched to both cities, and Air Force and Air National Guard jets patrolled the skies overhead. Police wielding shotguns patrolled the airport in Newark, among other cities.
Top Democratic and Republican party leaders on Capitol Hill promised to stand "shoulder to shoulder" and called for beefing up spying operations and "intelligence gathering"--code words for secret police prying into the activities of unions, civil rights organizations, working-class political parties, and other groups that come into conflict with the policies and actions of the superrich employers and their government and two-party system.
On September 12 heavily armed FBI agents stormed a Boston hotel and forced everyone out of the 36-story building, which was surrounded by SWAT teams holding machine guns. No arrests were made in connection with the attacks. Government officials stopped an Amtrak train in Rhode Island, and ordered everyone off. The local police chief said police in Boston had contacted him, saying there were some people on board the train they considered suspicious. A man with a long beard, wearing a green turban, was seen being taken in handcuffs from the train but was later released, with authorities saying he had no connection to the attacks. FBI agents and police also cordoned off streets and an apartment complex in Coral Springs and Vero Beach, Florida.
At the request of Washington, police in Hamburg, Germany, searched an apartment, the first such operation reported outside the United States. The FBI also asked German police to check a second address that a police statement said was the address of an acquaintance of "a person of Arab descent who was a passenger on one of the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center." German police reported they had detained two "suspects" and are searching for a third.
In addition, the FBI has executed search warrants on several major Internet providers. On September 12 the Associated Press reported that "federal police are reportedly increasing Internet surveillance," with the FBI beginning to visit web-based e-mail firms and Internet providers seeking to place the spy agency's Carnivore system, which monitors electronic communications, on the network. "An administrator at one major network service provider said that FBI agents showed up at his workplace on Tuesday "with a couple of Carnivores, requesting permission to place them on our core, along with offers to actually pay for circuits and costs." He said that "a lot of people" at other firms were quietly going along with the FBI's request.
Writing on the web site of the conservative National Review magazine, Daniel Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum and a former Reagan administration official, said the events of September 11 will "prompt an urgent and dramatic change of course in U.S. policy" to place the government on a stronger war footing both at home and abroad. Washington must begin approaching "terrorism as a form of warfare," Pipes said, "and to target not just those foot soldiers who actually carry out the violence but the organizations and government who stand behind them."
Instead of "relying too much on electronic intelligence," he said, the CIA and other secret police agencies need to "place agents in the inner circle of a terrorist group"--not just abroad, but against what he claims to be the "large Islamist terror network in the United States, one visible to anyone who cared to see it.... The time has come to crack down, and hard on those connected to this terror infrastructure."
Statement of Cuban government
One of the few voices of a head of state dissenting from the U.S.-organized war chorus was Cuban president Fidel Castro. In a September 11 speech, Castro pointed out that "this tragedy is a consequence of the use of terrorist methods against Cuba and other countries" over many years, including the war in Vietnam. He expressed opposition to U.S. bombings or other military actions by Washington in response to the attacks.
Calling for international cooperation against terrorism, which he said "will not be solved through the use of force," Castro read the statement of the Cuban government on the attacks in New York and Washington, D.C. "Cuba's position against any act of terrorism is well known," the statement said. "It is impossible to forget that our people have been the victims of such actions, promoted from U.S. territory itself, for more than 40 years."
The Cuban government offered condolences to the families of those killed or injured in the attacks and offered to cooperate with U.S. health institutions to provide medical and rehabilitation care.
'Targets of opportunity'
Editorial-page writers and opinion columnists in the big-business media are working overtime to whip up nationalist sentiments to rationalize imperialist acts of war abroad and curtailment of democratic rights at home.
"Every one of us Americans is in this war now," the New York Daily News said in an editorial. The New York Post editorialized: "It's time for random application of American power--tangible attacks on targets of opportunity." The New York Times wrote: "An unconventional and frightening assault on the American homeland has commenced. The American people and their leaders must mobilize the resources to meet it." And USA Today: "Need for homeland defense now a 'grim reality.'"
Andrew Sullivan, a senior editor of the New Republic magazine, was one of many who sounded similar themes. "The barbarians are now here," he said in a column, and the "response must be disproportionate to the crime and [we] must hold those states and governments that have tolerated this evil accountable."
Conveniently passing over the U.S. wars and U.S.-organized wars against the peoples of Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, Panama, Nicaragua, Grenada, Iraq, and elsewhere during the past half century--in which no fewer than 5 million people have been killed altogether, not counting U.S. soldiers--Sullivan claimed the September 11 attacks were the "single most devastating act of war since Nagasaki." (Nagasaki was the second city in Japan, Hiroshima being the first, obliterated in August 1945 by atomic bombs--the only time those weapons of mass destruction have been used--that were dropped on the orders of U.S. President Harry Truman. Some 300,000 people in those Japanese cities were slaughtered those two days or died from the effects of radiation poisoning soon afterwards.)
"And it is a reminder," Sullivan added, "that the forces of resentment and evil--so prominent only recently in the Durban conference--can no longer be appeased. They must be destroyed--systematically, durably, irrevocably. Perhaps now we will summon the will to do it."
Writing in the United Kingdom's Daily Telegraph, John Keegan drew up a wish list of military assaults and attacks on democratic rights that the ruling class would like to implement. "The most likely outcome is the imposition of measures to restrict freedom of movement and residence" and the introduction of "identity cards, compulsorily to be carried at all times.... Registration of residence is another," he said, and "surveillance networks will emerge in order to enforce residence controls at a local level."
"The United States will not start locking up Muslims tomorrow--it has yet to be established that the perpetrators were Muslim," Keegan wrote, "but if an Islamic organization is identified as responsible, life for Muslims inside the country will become socially difficult quite quickly and may be legally circumscribed soon after." He added, "Friendly campus life for Middle Easterners may soon be a thing of the past." Washington will also use these events, he said, to restrict the rights of immigrants and political refugees, rolling back whatever limited protections they may have won in recent years.
As to Washington and Tel Aviv's use of the attack to accelerate Israel's war drive against the Palestinian people, Keegan does his bit by implicating Palestinians in the attack. "If Israel were, unpromoted or nudged by Washington, now to decide to terminate the existence of the Palestinian Authority, destroy its structures and reoccupy the West Bank completely," he said, "those measures would be widely supported in America." The "one undoubted effect of the World Trade Center disaster is to heighten the likelihood of war in the Middle East," he said.
In Israel, government troops occupied the Jenin Palestinian refugee camp and exchanged gunfire with several residents. Tanks also entered Jenin City and surrounded two villages as well as the village of Tabus. Israeli military forces killed nine Palestinians in the four areas and wounded 20.
Anti-Muslin and Arab assaults
Muslin and Arab organizations across the United States reported they had received threats and hostile phone calls.
"Muslims nationwide shut down their mosques and schools as Americans awaited word about who is responsible for the destruction," Rachel Zoll reported for the Associated Press. In New York, newspapers reported verbal assaults and intimidation of Arab and Muslim people, including two women who were surrounded by a gang of youth, and a businessman who escaped three attackers by sprinting through a closing subway door.
"We unequivocally condemn" the September 11 attacks, said Omar Ricci of the Los Angeles branch of the Muslim Public Affairs Council. But "in the back of every American Muslim's mind right now is the camps that Japanese-Americans were thrown into after the [Pearl Harbor] bombing."
Arab and Muslim residents of the United States have been special targets of provisions of the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which allows the use of "secret evidence" to imprison individuals, as well as the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, which authorizes the deportation of noncitizens without judicial review or appeal. The U.S. government acknowledges using "secret evidence" in some 50 cases in recent years, nearly every one against a Muslim or Arab. Provisions in the two laws, both signed by the Clinton administration, authorize the government to deport immigrants, deny asylum, and deny bond to immigrants who are tarred as "terrorists." Since 1999 the government has been forced to release three Arab men jailed on secret evidence.
'Homeland defense'
In laying the propaganda groundwork for the domestic military command structure the Clinton administration established and Bush is now deploying, top U.S. officials over the past few years have spoken candidly about the need for the government to deploy troops in the United States and expand spying activity against organizations and individuals in this country.
Last October, then-defense secretary William Cohen gave a speech reported by the American Forces Press Service. "Cohen said that when he first proposed formation of a 'commander-in-chief for homeland defense' the idea was controversial. 'Immediately there were questions being raised as to whether or not this would intrude upon the constitutional prohibitions of getting our military involved in domestic affairs,' he said."
The report added, "Cohen said the United States must deal with the question now. 'I believe we, as a democratic society, have yet to come to grips with the tension that exists between our constitutional protection of the right to privacy with the demand we made on the need to protect us."
The July 13 New York Times reported that in a new Pentagon policy document released this summer, "For the first time, defense of the American homeland is incorporated into guidelines for American military strategy."
Shortly before the end of his term, Clinton also announced the creation of the post of "counterintelligence czar," which was later filled by Bush (see article on page 9). At the time of the attacks in New York and Washington, Congress was debating appropriating $800 million additional funds for such activity, described as "counterterrorism efforts" by USA Today.
At his confirmation hearing earlier this year, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said the government needs to focus on "improving our intelligence capabilities so that we know more about what people think, and how they behave, and how their behavior can be altered, and what the capabilities are in this world."
Below are just a few examples from recent years of steps by the federal government, with bipartisan backing, to curtail democratic rights and narrow the space for workers, farmers, and formations of the oppressed and exploited to organize against capitalist assaults on our social rights and our living and working conditions.