‘Is That Orwellian Or Kafkaesque Enough For You?’ The Guardian Removes Bin Laden’s ‘Letter To America’

Media Lens

(...) On 15 November, [The Guardian] removed Osama bin Laden’s ‘Letter to America’ which it had hosted on its website for almost 21 years. What was suddenly so problematic about the letter that it had to be abruptly removed by the Guardian after being on its website for so long (an archived version can be seen here)?

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'Removed: document'. The Guardian removes Osama bin Laden's 'Letter to America'. Screenshot taken the day after it was the most viewed link on the Guardian website (image by Glenn Greenwald).

The letter has been ‘rediscovered’ during Israel’s current genocidal assault against Palestinians in Gaza, with people around the world discussing relevant issues online. The Guardian link to the letter went viral, particularly among young people on TikTok, with 14 million views of videos tagged with #lettertoamerica. Many of these videos were posted by young Americans, shocked to find that people around the world hate their country because of strong grievances rooted in real issues. (...)

‘And yet, after 9/11, the US government instructed the television networks – ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, Fox – do not show any speeches or interviews with Osama bin Laden, because they didn’t want the American population hearing from him what their actual grievances were. They didn’t want Americans to think that maybe we had done things in that part of the world that caused it to happen, that causes “blowback”, to use the CIA’s term.’

As with any statement from an influential or powerful figure, bin Laden’s letter needs to be read critically. There is much to revile in the letter, not least its antisemitism and homophobia. But consider some of the grievances he detailed against the US government, summarised below:

• Palestine was ethnically cleansed to allow the state of Israel to be set up in 1948. Since then, the Palestinians have been subjected to an Israeli military occupation, suffering for decades as a result of massacres, imprisonment, torture, shootings, bombs, destruction of homes and livelihoods: all backed with massive military, economic and diplomatic support from the US.
• Sanctions against Iraq, pushed heavily by the US, led to the deaths of 1.5 million Iraqis, 0.5 million of them children under 5.
• US attacks in Somalia, support for Russian atrocities in Chechnya, and support for Israeli aggression against Lebanon.
• Oppression of the populations of US client states in the Middle East, ruled by authoritarian monarchs, or where democratically elected leaders were removed and replaced by US-friendly dictators.
• The exploitation of the Middle East’s natural resources, especially oil, by Western corporations at paltry prices secured through economic and military threats.
• US military bases spread across the region, protecting what the US sees as its own assets.
• The leading US role in destroying climate stability – in particular, its refusal to sign the Kyoto agreement made at the 1997 UN Climate Summit – in order to preserve the profits of US fossil fuel giants.
• US power and influence has been used, not to defend universal humanitarian principles and values, but to secure US geostrategic interests and profits.
• The dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, even though Japan was ready to negotiate an end to the war. (...)

So why did the Guardian, which proclaims its credentials in supposedly enabling readers to understand the world, remove bin Laden’s letter from its website? (...)

As Greenwald observed, US ‘Big Tech’ companies – Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter) – are already subjected to censorship in accordance with the dictates of the US security state, as the ‘Twitter files’, a cache of leaked documents, showed. TikTok, a Chinese company, was the only major platform outside the reach of the US. But, noted Greenwald, they were told that, as a condition of being able to continue to operate in the US, they would have to agree to the censorship demands of the US government. Hence, TikTok’s determination to ban TikTok clips discussing #lettertoamerica.

In other words, the censorship actions taken by both TikTok and the Guardian align with the requirements of the US government. This should come as no surprise to anyone who is familiar with the long history of the Guardian acting as a liberal gatekeeper for establishment power. Moreover, the paper’s ever-closer relationship with UK state security services, themselves subservient to US state power, is abundantly clear. (...)

As Greenwald noted:

‘Is that Orwellian enough, or Kafkaesque enough, for you? The article in which most people had an interest in reading was the [letter hosted by the] Guardian [which], precisely because too many people were interested in it, [the editors] decided to remove, so that people couldn’t read it any longer. It’s a document by a major historical figure. The person we’re told was responsible for the 9/11 attack explaining to Americans why people in that part of the world were angry enough with America to do that.

‘And the Guardian decided, even though it had been up on their website for 21 years, that now that people were discussing it in connection with the war in Gaza from Israel, and US support for it, you can no longer read it.’ (...)

Complete article

Tags: #journalist #journalism #media #news #guardian #the_guardian #censorship #osama_bin_laden #lettertoamerica #israel #gaza #palestine #palestinians #occupied_territories

9/11 Unleashed a Global Storm of Human Rights Abuses

Human Rights Watch

(...) The September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States were foremost a tragedy for the nearly 3,000 victims and their families. (...)

Compounding this tragedy, the horror of the attacks spawned an abusive reaction that reverberates to this day. Instead of reaffirming the human rights standards that prohibit such instrumental cruelty, the administration of President George W. Bush shredded them. The American people, appalled and frightened by the magnitude of the attacks, didn’t adequately push back. Often, because so much was done in secret, they didn’t even know, at least until much later. (...)

The brutal mistreatment of suspects, such as by waterboarding, was papered over with the euphemism “enhanced interrogation techniques.” (...)

The effect of this indifference to human rights sparked emulation elsewhere. Brutal rulers figured out that the best way to get away with mass abuse was to label it a fight against “terrorism.” The Chinese government uses that line to justify detaining 1 million Uyghur and other Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang until they abandon Islam, their culture, and their language. Presidents Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey and Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt have each detained tens of thousands of people under that rationale despite, typically, an utter lack of evidence. The Israeli government uses it to justify the 14-year-long closure and periodic bombing of the people of Gaza.

Beyond the abuses themselves, was the conceptual damage. Rather than using law enforcement means to address the horrible crimes of September 11, the Bush administration declared a “global war on terror” that extended to every corner of the earth, far beyond the borders of Afghanistan, where the Al-Qaeda leader, Osama bin Laden, was believed to be hiding. That purportedly allowed detaining suspects found anywhere as “enemy combatants” without charge or trial until the “war” ended, meaning, potentially, forever. That laid the groundwork for indefinite detentions at Guantanamo Bay.

The “war” paradigm was also used to justify killing suspects wherever they were found, often on the flimsiest of evidence. (...)

A more enlightened approach to countering terrorism would have enlisted Muslim communities. Most Muslims in the United States were appalled by the perversion of Islam that Al-Qaeda used to justify the September 11 and other attacks. Globally, Muslims are the primary victims of terrorism. Yet from the Bush to the Barack Obama and Donald Trump administrations, Muslims as a whole were treated with varying degrees of suspicion, subjected to police surveillance, profiled for interrogation, targeted for entrapment, locked up as “material witnesses.” (...)

The US government’s quest to maintain impunity for torture is also the main reason why none of the five alleged planners of the September 11 attacks has been tried. (...) But the US government wanted to dispense with due-process protections and avoid its torture becoming public, and to use as much as possible the fruits of that torture. So rather than send the September 11 suspects to a traditional court, it devised special “military commissions”, a “justice” system concocted from scratch, stacked against the defense, and fundamentally unfair. (...)

It is a time to condemn the evil of terrorism. It is also the time to close Guantanamo, by releasing all of the 39 aging detainees still there, who have not been charged, and giving the rest a fair trial in a proper court. It is time, as much as still possible, to prosecute those who ordered the secret detention and torture, and to release the full Senate Intelligence Committee report on this despicable program. And it is time formally to end the “global war on terror”, to admit that, in the absence of a genuine armed conflict, terrorism offenses can be fought like any other serious crime within the confines of international human rights law, without the endless detention and summary killings that have plagued this forever “war.”

Full article

> See also: Twenty Years On: The Legacy of 9/11 (Human Rights Watch)

A man stands in the rubble after the collapse of the first World Trade Center Tower in New York City on September 11, 2001.
© 2001 DOUG KANTER/AFP via Getty Images.

Tags: #9-11 #terrorism #terrorist_attack #war_on_terror #human_rights #human_rights_abuse #torture #waterboarding #enhanced_interrogation_techniques #justice #guantanamo #ennemy_combatant #china #uygurs #xinjiang #turkey #erdogan #egypt sisi #el-sisi #israel #gaza #occupied_terrotories #state_of_law #al_quaeda #osama_bin_laden #extra_judicial_killings #drone_attacks