Ward Churchill supports "Blowback" paradigm, misses real story
Professor Ward Churchill is a target of the right-wing propaganda machine
for daring to suggest that 9/11 happened as retaliation for US foreign
policies in the Middle East.
It's a shame that Ward Churchill is so opposed to looking at the evidence
for Bush / Cheney complicity in 9/11. Churchill notes that the World Trade
Center had a CIA office in it -- but fails to mention that this was in
Building 7.
Churchill's comments ironically support the Bush regime propaganda that
9/11 was a surprise attack, which is not true! (Churchill's main disagreement
with the official story is the motivation of the alleged perpetrators
-- he's a supporter of the "Blowback" theory that we were attacked
as revenge for US foreign policy, although "Blowback" does not
adequate explain the events of 9/11, and the interference with numerous
governmental systems designed to prevent attacks.)
Hopefully Professor Churchill will be able to keep his job and that the
hate directed against him moderates (or goes away), but it would have
been better for him to get his facts straight about how
9/11 was deliberately allowed to happen and assisted.
His books "The Cointelpro Papers" and "Agents of Repression"
are among the best analyses of the "COINTELPRO"
programs to disrupt social change organizations.
Left Denial on 9/11 Turns Irrational
by Jack Straw
www.indybay.org/news/2005/05/1736367.php 6 May 2005
www.globalresearch.ca 8 May 2005
The URL of this article is: http://globalresearch.ca/articles/STR505A.html
People like Noam Chomsky and Ward Churchill are turning
toward the irrational as they continue to deny increasing signs that 9/11
was an inside job.
Ever since the events of 9/11, the American Left and even ultra-Left have
been downright fanatical in combating notions that the U.S. government
was complicit in the attacks or at least had foreknowledge of the events.
Lately, this stance has taken a turn towards the irrational.
In a recent interview, Noam Chomsky has made an incredible assertion:
"There's by now a small industry on the thesis that the administration
had something to do with 9-11. I've looked at some of it, and have often
been asked. There's a weak thesis that is possible though extremely
unlikely in my opinion, and a strong thesis that is close to inconceivable.
The weak thesis is that they knew about it and didn't try to stop it.
The strong thesis is that they were actually involved. The evidence
for either thesis is, in my opinion, based on a failure to understand
properly what evidence is. Even in controlled scientific experiments
one finds all sorts of unexplained phenomena, strange coincidences,
loose ends, apparent contradictions, etc. Read the letters in technical
science journals and you'll find plenty of samples. In real world situations,
chaos is overwhelming, and these will mount to the sky. That aside,
they'd have had to be quite mad to try anything like that. It would
have had to involve a large number of people, something would be very
likely to leak, pretty quickly, they'd all be lined up before firing
squads and the Republican Party would be dead forever. That would have
happened whether the plan succeeded or not, and success was at best
a long shot; it would have been extremely hard to predict what would
happen."
More recently, Ward Churchill, under fire for his comments following
the 9/11 attacks comparing the people in the WTC towers to "little
Eichmanns", took a somewhat different turn to the irrational. This
comes via an email from a friend:
"I went to the Friday (3/25/05) night event which was organized
by the so-called 'anarchist' AK Press people who in 'true anarchist
spirit' only allowed written questions which they selected (i.e. censored)
and handed to Churchill to read one by one. Needless to say my question
as to how he reconciles the fact that his 'roosting chickens' thesis
is consistent with the 'war on terror' mythology was not asked. A badly
phrased 9-11 question did get through. He first said "as to what
actually happened on 9-11, I'm open to different theories, I have not
seen any evidence" (to which I would of course say - well look
at it you idiot!) - or something to that effect - at this point there
was scattered clapping - and then he added "But, the problem with
the idea that it was an inside job is that it suggests that brown people
are not capable of such feats and gives all the credit to the white
man, another master race fantasy". Many people seemed to like this
silly analysis - although a couple of people shouted loudly "that's
ridiculous!". Anyway he clearly illustrated what a dolt he is,
his past work notwithstanding."
This happened in Oakland. The following day, while Churchill was speaking
at the Anarchist Book Fair in San Francisco, someone yelled out to the
effect that the people who are after Churchill are also the real perpetrators
of 9/11. He paused for maybe two seconds, and responded to the effect
that this was the same racist crap about brown people not being able to
defend themselves. The audience gave him a standing ovation. Such a viewpoint
parallels an article in New Left Review from Summer '04 in which a (self-styled)
situationist group named Retort from the San Francisco Bay Area claimed
the 9/11 attacks are evidence that outside groups can still strike at
the dominant spectacle from the outside. The Reverend Chuck-O of Indymedia
omnipresence, always on the prowl for anyone daring to discuss 9/11 skepticism
and acting when he can to quickly end any such discussions, has also endorsed
this view.
With all due regard to Chomsky and Churchill, and an absolute stance against
any effort at censorship, we must not let respect for their past achievements
or current efforts at repressing them stand in the way of clarity and
the insistence on the truth.
Chomsky condemns the actions supposedly undertaken by "Arab terrorists",
driven by the injustices of U.S. foreign policy, though he also condemns
the "reaction" of the US government to these attacks as opportunistic
moves to legitimate imperialist expansion, a perspective widely shared
in the American "Left" and even "ultra-Left". On the
other hand, Churchill implicitly endorses these attacks as blows against
the empire, something others like Retort are more willing to say outright.
But both perspectives fully accept the official story as to who carried
out the attacks.
[note: the "Left Denial" article is generally very good about
the strange myopia of the "left" about 9/11, but it is marred
by a strange focus on alleged, unprovable assertions of temperature inside
the burning towers that supposedly means they were demolished,
and most of the web links for additional information are bogus.
The "Left Denial" article ignores the evidence about foreknowledge,
warnings to insiders, the stock trades on United and American Airlines
just before 9/11, the anthrax attacks on the media and the Democrats,
the motivation of Peak Oil and creating the pretext for invading the Middle
East oil fields, among other issues that have very strong evidence for
complicity. These omissions allow the leftists in denial to avoid the
issue of complicity.]
February 3, 2005
On the Injustice of Getting Smeared
A Campaign of Fabrications and Gross Distortions
By WARD CHURCHILL
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.
Ward Churchill is the author of On the Justice of Roosting Chickens.
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: People who work in the
financial industry are legitimate military targets. Where do you draw
the line? 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 @ 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.
Note: Guerrilla News Network's 2003 film "Aftermath:
Unanswered Questions from 9/11" is a MUCH better analysis of September
11th than Professor Churchill's comments. While the premier showing of
Aftermath in San Francisco was a sold-out audience (with hundreds more
turned away for lack of seats), it is a film that was completely ignored
by the "left gatekeepers" such
as Common Dreams, Counterpunch, and other pillars of the liberal / left
establishment.
American Association of University Professors
Statement on Professor Ward Churchill Controversy
We have witnessed an extraordinary outpouring of criticism aimed both
at Professor Ward Churchill of the University of Colorado at Boulder,
for his written remarks describing victims of the attacks on September
11, 2001, as "little Eichmanns," and at the invitation for him
to speak at Hamilton College in New York. Television commentators urged
viewers to write to Hamilton College to condemn what the professor had
written and the college's decision to invite him. More than 6,000 e-mail
messages were sent to Hamilton College president Joan Hinde Stewart, who
described them as "ranging from angry to profane, obscene, violent."
The governor of New York wrote a letter of protest to President Stewart
and in a dinner banquet described Professor Churchill as a "bigoted
terrorist supporter." The governor of Colorado called on the professor
to resign from the University of Colorado and, one day later, called for
his dismissal. Professor Churchill reports that he and his wife
have received more than 100 death threats. The prospect of violence
at Hamilton College led the administration there to cancel the visit.
The American Association of University Professors, since its founding
in 1915, has been committed to preserving and advancing principles of
academic freedom in this nation's colleges and universities. Freedom of
faculty members to express views, however unpopular or distasteful, is
an essential condition of an institution of higher learning that is truly
free. We deplore threats of violence
heaped upon Professor Churchill, and we reject the notion
that some viewpoints are so offensive or disturbing that the academic
community should not allow them to be heard and debated. Also reprehensible
are inflammatory statements by public officials that interfere in the
decisions of the academic community.
Should serious questions arise about Professor Churchill's fitness to
continue at the University of Colorado -- the only acceptable basis for
terminating a continuing or tenured faculty appointment -- those questions
should be judged by a faculty committee that affords the essential safeguards
of due process, as required by the university's and the Board of Regents'
official policies. Special care must be taken, however, to avoid applying
harsher standards in such a case, or following less rigorous procedures,
because of the statements made by Professor Churchill about the tragic
events of September 11, 2001. While members of the academic community
are free to condemn what they believe are repugnant views expressed by
a faculty member, any charges arising from such statements must be judged
by the same standards and procedures that would apply to statements unrelated
to the terrorist attacks and the loss of life on that fateful day. We
must resist the temptation to judge such statements more harshly because
they evoke special anguish among survivors and families of the September
11 victims. The critical test of academic freedom is its capacity to meet
even the most painful and offending statements. A college or university
campus is, of all places in our society, the most appropriate forum for
the widest range of viewpoints.
http://www.aaup.org/newsroom/Newsitems/churchill.htm
