Concerning September 11, 2001 and the bombing of Afghanistan
By William Blum
Following the terrible, momentous events of September 11, 2001, the most pressing mission facing the United States, in addition to punishing the perpetrators who were still alive, was – or should have been – to not allow what happened to pass without deriving important lessons from it to prevent its recurrence. Clearly, the most meaningful of these lessons was the answer to the question: Why do terrorists hate America enough to give up their lives in order to deal the country such mortal blows?
Of course it’s not America the terrorists hate; it’s American foreign policy. It’s what the United States has done to the world in the past half century – all the violence, the bombings, the depleted uranium, the cluster bombs, the assassinations, the promotion of torture, the overthrow of governments, and more.
The terrorists – whatever else they might be – are also rational human beings; which is to say that in their own minds they have a rational justification for their actions. Most terrorists are people deeply concerned by what they see as social, political, or religious injustice and hypocrisy, and the immediate grounds for their terrorism is often retaliation for an action of the United States.
There’s no need to wonder about the possible motivations of those from the Middle East or other Muslim countries to commit terrorist acts against the United States. Consider these actions of American foreign policy during the last 20 years:
The shooting down of two Libyan planes in 1981; the bombardment of Beirut in 1983 and 1984; the furnishing of military aid and intelligence to both sides of the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-88 so as to maximize the damage each side would inflict upon the other; the bombing of Libya in 1986; the bombing and sinking of an Iranian ship in 1987; the shooting down of an Iranian passenger plane in 1988; the shooting down of two more Libyan planes in 1989; the massive bombing of the Iraqi people in 1991; the continuing bombings and sanctions against Iraq; the bombing of Afghanistan and Sudan in 1998, the latter destroying a pharmaceutical plant which provided for half the impoverished nation’s medicine; the habitual support of Israel despite the devastation and routine torture it inflicts upon the Palestinian people; the condemnation of Palestinian resistance to this; the abduction of “suspected terrorists” from Muslim countries, such as Malaysia, Pakistan, Lebanon and Albania, who are then taken to places like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, where they are tortured; the large military and hi-tech presence in Islam’s holiest land, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere in the Persian Gulf region; the support of anti-democratic Middle East governments from the Shah to the Saudis.
It’s not just people in the Middle East who have good reason for hating what the US government does. The United States has created huge numbers of potential terrorists all over Latin America during a half century of American actions far worse than what it’s done in the Middle East. If Latin Americans shared the belief of many Muslims that they will go directly to paradise for martyring themselves by killing the great enemy, by now we might have had decades of repeated terrorist horror coming from south of the border.
There’s also the people of Asia and Africa. Ditto. The magnitude of the September 11 attack was such that the American media – the serious or passably serious segment of it – were obliged to delve into areas they normally do not visit. A number of mainstream newspapers, magazines and radio stations, in their quest to understand “Why?”, suddenly – or so it seemed – discovered that the United States had been engaged in actions such as the above and countless other interventions in foreign lands over decades that could indeed produce a great measure of anti-American feeling.
This was one positive outcome of the tragedy. This “revelation”, however, appeared to escape the mass of the American people, the great majority of whom get their snatches of foreign news from tabloid newspapers, lowest-common-denominator radio programs, and laughably superficial TV newscasts.
Thus it was that instead of an outpouring of reflection upon what the United States does to the world to make it so hated, there was an outpouring of patriotism of the narrowest kind: Congress members stood on the steps of the Capitol and sang “God Bless America”, stores quickly sold out their stocks of American flags, which fluttered high and low from whatever one’s eyes fell upon, callers to radio shows spit out venom and bloodlust, at entertainment and sporting events it became de rigueur to begin with a military and/or patriotic ceremony, one could hardly pick up a newspaper or turn on the radio or TV without some tribute to American courage, and everyone and his cousin were made into “heroes”. This phenomenon continued, scarcely abated, into the year 2002.
And the serious American media soon returned to normal mode; i.e., one could regularly find more significant and revealing information concerning US foreign policy in the London papers, The Guardian and The Independent, than in the New York Times and Washington Post.
Most Americans find it difficult in the extreme to accept the proposition that terrorist acts against the United States can be viewed as revenge for Washington’s policies abroad. They believe that the US is targeted because of its freedom, its democracy, its modernity, its wealth, or just being part of the West. The Bush administration, like its predecessors following other terrorist acts, has pushed this as the official line ever since the attacks. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni, a conservative watchdog group founded by Lynne Cheney, wife of the vice-president, announced in November the formation of the Defense of Civilization Fund, declaring that “It was not only America that was attacked on September 11, but civilization. We were attacked not for our vices, but for our virtues.” 1
But government officials know better. A Department of Defense study in 1997 concluded that: “Historical data show a strong correlation between US involvement in international situations and an increase in terrorist attacks against the United States.” 2
Former president Jimmy Carter, some years after he left the White House, was unambiguous in his concordance with such a sentiment:
We sent Marines into Lebanon and you only have to go to Lebanon, to Syria or to Jordan to witness first-hand the intense hatred among many people for the United States because we bombed and shelled and unmercifully killed totally innocent villagers – women and children and farmers and housewives – in those villages around Beirut. … As a result of that … we became kind of a Satan in the minds of those who are deeply resentful. That is what precipitated the taking of our hostages and that is what has precipitated some of the terrorist attacks – which were totally unjustified and criminal. 3
The terrorists responsible for the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 sent a letter to the New York Times which stated, in part: “We declare our responsibility for the explosion on the mentioned building. This action was done in response for the American political, economical, and military support to Israel the state of terrorism and to the rest of the dictator countries in the region.” 4
The Perpetrators
For more than four months the most powerful nation in history rained down a daily storm of missiles upon one of the poorest and most backward people in the world. Eventually, this question pressed itself onto the world’s stage: Who killed more innocent, defenseless people? The terrorists in the United States on September 11 with their flying bombs? Or the Americans in Afghanistan with their AGM-86D cruise missiles, their AGM-130 missiles, their 15,000 pound “daisy cutter” bombs, their depleted uranium, and their cluster bombs?
By year’s end, the count of the terrorists’ victims in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania stood at about 3,000. The total count of civilian dead in Afghanistan was essentially ignored by American officials and just about everyone else, but a painstaking compilation of numerous individual reports from the domestic and international media, aid agencies, and the United Nations, by an American professor – hunting down the many separate incidents of 100-plus counts of the dead, the scores of dead, the dozens, and the smaller numbers – arrived at considerably more than 3,500 through early December, and still counting. 5
This latter figure does not include those who died later of bomb injuries, or those who died from cold and hunger due to the bombing’s interruption of aid supplies and destruction of their homes, which turned them into refugees. Neither does it include the thousands of “military” deaths or the hundreds of prisoners who were executed or otherwise slaughtered by Washington’s new “freedom fighters” in conjunction with American military and intelligence operatives. In the final analysis, the body count will also be missing the inevitable victims of cluster bombs- turned landmines (amongst the first victims of the US bombing were four UN minesweepers) and those who perish slower deaths from depleted-uranium-caused sicknesses.
There will be no minutes of silence for the Afghan dead, no memorial services attended by high American officials and entertainment celebrities, no messages of condolence sent by heads of state, no millions of dollars raised for the victims’ families. Yet, all in all, it was a bloodbath that more than rivals that of September 11.
And of the thousands dead in Afghanistan, how many, can it be said with any certainty, had played a conscious role in the American catastrophe?
According to the video of Osama bin Laden presented to the world by the US government, he himself didn’t find out the exact date of the terrorist act until five days before it took place, and most of the hijackers did not know they were part of a suicide mission until they prepared to board the planes. (The FBI reportedly came to the latter conclusion long before the video was made public.) 6 Given that, it appears eminently safe to say that exceedingly few other people in the world were knowingly in on the plot, perhaps a number that can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Consequently, if the American bombing campaign was designed to kill the actual perpetrators, it was a fool’s mission; a violent fool.
If Timothy McVeigh, perpetrator of the terrible bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995, had not been quickly caught, would the United States have bombed the state of Michigan or any of the other places he called home? No, they would have instituted a mammoth manhunt until they found him and punished him. But in Afghanistan, the United States proceeded virtually on the assumption that everyone who supported the Taliban government, native or foreigner, was 1) a “terrorist” and 2) morally, if not legally, stained with the blood of September 11 – or perhaps one or another anti-US terrorist action of the past – and was thus fair game.
However, when the shoe is on another foot, even American officials can perceive which is the honorable path to walk. Speaking of Russia’s problem with Chechnya in 1999, the US State Department’s second in command, Strobe Talbott, urged Moscow to show “restraint and wisdom”. Restraint, he said, “means taking action against real terrorists, but not using indiscriminate force that endangers innocents.” 7
Suggesting a moral equivalency between the United States and terrorists (or, during the cold war, with communists) never fails to inflame American anger. The terrorists purposely aimed to kill civilians we are told (actually, many of the victims were military or military employees), while any non-combatant victims of the American bombings were completely accidental.
Whenever the United States goes into one of its periodic bombing frenzies and its missiles take the lives of numerous civilians, this is called “collateral damage” – inflicted by the Fates of War; for the real targets, we are invariably told, were military.
But if day after day, in one country after another, the same scenario takes place – dropping prodigious quantities of powerfully lethal ordnance from very high altitudes with the full knowledge that large numbers of civilians will perish or be maimed, even without missiles going “astray” – what can one say about the intentions of the American military? The best, the most charitable, thing that can be said is that they simply don’t care. They want to bomb and destroy for certain political ends and they don’t particularly care if the civilian population suffers grievously. “Negligent homicide” might be suitable legal terminology.
In Afghanistan, when, on successive days in October, US gunships machine-gunned and cannoned the remote farming village of Chowkar-Karez killing as many as 93 civilians, a Pentagon official was moved to respond at one point: “the people there are dead because we wanted them dead”, while US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld commented: “I cannot deal with that particular village.” 8
On occasion, US bombing campaigns do have as part of their agenda the causing of suffering, hoping that it will lead the people under the falling bombs to turn against the government. This was a recurrent feature of the bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999. As can be seen in the “War Criminals” chapter of Rogue State by the author, US/NATO officials – in their consummate arrogance – freely admitted this again and again. And in Afghanistan we have the example of the chief of the British Defense Staff, Adm. Sir Michael Boyce, declaring that the bombing will continue “until the people of the country themselves recognize that this is going to go on until they get the leadership changed.” 9
Such a policy fits very well into the FBI definition of international terrorism, which speaks of the use of force or violence against persons or property “to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.”
In any event, the September 11 terrorists could just as easily claim that their aim was not to kill civilians but to inflict great damage to the institutions that represent and carry out American imperialism – the World Trade Center = the economic arm, the Pentagon = the military arm, and the aborted plane attack may well have been intended for the political arm: the White House. After all, if killing civilians were their principal aim they could have flown one or more planes into a full football stadium – right into the stands – and killed many thousands more.
Speak no evil, so Americans will see no evil
In reaction to a number of gruesome images of Afghan bombing victims, and expressed European and Middle-Eastern concern about civilian casualties, the American media strove to downplay the significance of such deaths. The chairman of Cable News Network (CNN) advised the news staff that it “seems perverse to focus too much on the casualties or hardship in Afghanistan.” 10 A Fox Network report on the war wondered why journalists should bother covering civilian deaths at all. “The question I have,” said the host, “is civilian casualties are historically, by definition, a part of war, really. Should they be as big news as they’ve been?” His guest from National Public Radio replied: “No. Look, war is about killing people. Civilian casualties are unavoidable.” Another guest, a columnist from the national magazine, U.S. News & World Report, had no argument: “Civilian casualties are not … news. The fact is that they accompany wars.” 11
But if in fact the September 11 attacks were an act of war, as the world has been told repeatedly by George W. Bush and his minions, then the casualties of the World Trade Center were clearly civilian war casualties. Why then has the media devoted so much time to their deaths?
These were the only kind of deaths Americans wanted to hear about and they could become furious when told of Afghan deaths. A memo circulated at the Panama City, Florida News Herald warned editors: “DO NOT USE photos on Page 1A showing civilian casualties from the U.S. war on Afghanistan. Our sister paper in Fort Walton Beach has done so and received hundreds and hundreds of threatening e-mails and the like.” 12
The American powers-that-be can indeed count on support for their wars from the American people and the corporate media. It would take an exemplary research effort to uncover a single American daily newspaper that unequivocally opposed the US bombing of Afghanistan.
Or a single American daily newspaper that unequivocally opposed the US-NATO bombing of Yugoslavia two years earlier.
Or a single American daily newspaper that unequivocally opposed the US bombing of Iraq in 1991.
Is this not remarkable? In a supposedly free society, with a supposedly free press, and almost 1,500 daily newspapers, the odds should be decidedly against this being the case. But that’s the way it is.
The Mecca of hypocrisy
After the terrorist attacks in the United States, Secretary of State Colin Powell condemned “people who believe with the destruction of buildings, with the murder of people, they can somehow achieve a political purpose.” 13
Does that not precisely describe what the United States did in 1999 when it bombed Yugoslavia for 78 days and nights? And is this not the same Colin Powell who directed the horrific bombings of Panama and Iraq? Do American leaders think that no one has any memory? Or do they simply not care what people think?
More hypocrisy of the breathtaking kind: President Bush and other officials have routinely and angrily declared that it’s not only terrorists that the US is going to be waging war against, it’s any nation which harbors terrorists. However, in the chapter “Haven for terrorists”, in the author’s book, “Rogue State: A guide to the World’s Only Superpower”, the reader will see that there are few, if any, nations that harbor more terrorists than the United States.
Winning Afghan hearts and minds
Bombs were not all that fell from the sky from American airplanes. There were also food packages. Was it not something inordinately strange for the United States to be dropping both bombs and food on the people of Afghanistan at the same time?
If the Japanese had dropped some nice packages of teriyaki along with the bombs at Pearl Harbor, would Americans and the world have looked more kindly on the Japanese?
Perhaps if the September 11 terrorists had dropped some hot pastrami sandwiches on downtown Manhattan before their hijacked planes hit the World Trade Center …
But these things work of course. Millions of Americans felt a rush of pride about their country’s magnanimity. The United States, the inventor and perfecter of modern advertising and public relations, had done it again.
And in the same vein, there were the many flyers dropped upon the people of Afghanistan. Here’s one dropped around Oct. 20:
Do you enjoy being ruled by the Taliban? Are you proud to live a life of fear? Are you happy to see the place your family has owned for generations a terrorist training site? Do you want a regime that is turning Afghanistan into the Stone Age and giving Islam a bad name? Are you proud to live under a government that harbors terrorists? Are you proud to live in a nation ruled by extreme fundamentalists?
The Taliban have robbed your country of your culture and heritage. They have destroyed your national monuments, and cultural artifacts. They rule by force, violence, and fear based on the advice of foreigners. They insist that their form of Islam is the one and only form, the true form, the divine form. They see themselves as religious experts, even though they are ignorant. They kill, commit injustice, keep you in poverty and claim it is in the name of God.
In the same spirit, the following flyer might be dropped over the United States:
Do you enjoy being ruled by the Republican-Democratic Party? Are you proud to live a life of fear, insecurity and panic? Are you happy to see the place your family has owned for generations taken away by a bank? Do you want a regime that is turning the United States into a police state and giving Christianity a bad name?
Are you proud to live under a government that harbors hundreds of terrorists in Miami? Are you proud to live in a nation ruled by extreme capitalists and religious conservatives? The capitalists have robbed your country of your equality and justice. They have destroyed your national parks and rivers and corrupted your media, your elections and your personal relations. They rule by threat of unemployment, hunger, and homelessness based on the advice of a god called the market. They insist that their form of organizing a society and remaking the world is the one and only form, the true form, the divine form. They see themselves as morality experts, even though they are ignorant. They bomb, invade, assassinate, torture, overthrow, commit injustice, keep you and the world in poverty and claim it is in the name of God.
Rebuilding Afghanistan?
“U.S. Meeting Envisions Rebuilding Afghanistan” read the headline in the Washington Post of November 21. After a one-day meeting in Washington of leaders from two dozen nations and international organizations, US and Japanese officials said they had developed an “action program” for the long-term rebuilding of the war-ravaged country.
This well may have throw another log on the feel-good-about-America fire that was warming the frazzled citizenry since September 11. But like much of that fuel, there was likely a lot more propaganda here than substance.
It’s a remarkable pattern. The United States has a long record of bombing nations, reducing entire neighborhoods, and much of cities, to rubble, wrecking the infrastructure, ruining the lives of those the bombs didn’t kill. And afterward doing nothing to repair the damage.
Though promised in writing that the US would pursue its “traditional policy” of “postwar reconstruction”, no compensation was given to Vietnam after a decade of devastation. During the same period, Laos and Cambodia were wasted by US bombing as unrelentlessly as was Vietnam. After the Indochina wars were over, these nations, too, qualified to become beneficiaries of Washington’s “traditional policy” of zero reconstruction.
Then came the American bombings of Grenada and Panama in the 1980s. There went their neighborhoods. Hundreds of Panamanians petitioned the Washington-controlled Organization of American States as well as American courts, all the way up to the US Supreme Court, for “just compensation” for the damage caused by Operation Just Cause (this being the not-tongue-in-cheek name given to the American invasion and bombing). They got just nothing, as did the people of Grenada.
It was Iraq’s turn next, in 1991: 40 days and nights of relentless bombing; destruction of power, water and sanitation systems and everything else that goes into the making of a modern society. Everyone knows how much the United States has done to help rebuild Iraq.
In 1999 we had the case of Yugoslavia: 78 days of round-the-clock bombing, transforming an advanced industrial state into virtually a third world country; the reconstruction needs were awesome. Two years later, June 2001, after the Serbs had obediently followed Washington’s wishes to oust Slobodan Milosevic and turn him over to the kangaroo court in the Hague that the US had pushed through the Security Council, a “donor’s conference” was convened by the European Commission and the World Bank, supposedly concerned with Yugoslavia’s reconstruction. It turned out to be a conference concerned with Yugoslavia’s debts more than anything else.
Serbian premier Zoran Djindjic, regarded as highly pro-Western, said, in a July interview with the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel, that he felt betrayed by the West, declaring:
“It would have been better if the donors-conference had not taken place and instead we had been given 50 million DM in cash. … In August we should be getting the first installment, 300 million Euro. Suddenly we are being told that 225 million Euro will be withheld for the repayment of old debts which in part were accumulated during Tito’s time. Two thirds of that sum are fines and interests, accrued because Milosevic refused for ten years to pay back these credits. We shall get the remaining 75 million Euro in November at the earliest. Such are the principles in the West, we are being told. This means: A seriously ill person is to be given medicine after he is dead. Our critical months will be July, August and September.” 14
As of the end of 2001 it was 2 1/2 years since Yugoslavian bridges fell into the Danube, the country’s factories and homes destroyed, its transportation torn apart. As of yet, Yugoslavia has not received any funds for reconstruction from the architect and leading perpetrator of the bombing campaign, the United States.
Whoever winds up ruling Afghanistan will find it conspicuously difficult to block the US military from building what it wants to build there for its own purposes. As to the United States doing some building for the Afghan people, they may have a long wait. In marked contrast to the Washington Post headline of November 21 noted above, was the report in the same newspaper five weeks later: “The Bush administration has made clear that because it has paid for most of the military campaign that made the new government possible, it expects other countries, especially Japan and European nations, to lead the way in rebuilding the country.” 15
As if the American bombing campaign had been carried out at the request of, or for the benefit of, Japan and Europe, and not for Washington’s own interests.
Following the their bombing of Iraq, the United States wound up with military bases in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and neighboring countries in the Persian Gulf region.
Following their bombing of Yugoslavia, the United States wound up with military bases in Kosovo, Albania, Macedonia, Hungary, Bosnia and Croatia.
Following their bombing of Afghanistan, the United States appears on course to wind up with military bases in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and perhaps elsewhere in the area.
The bombing, invasion and occupation of Afghanistan were conducted – apart from the primitive lashing out in blind revenge against … somebody – primarily for the purpose of insuring the installation of a new government that will be sufficiently amenable to Washington’s international objectives, including the siting of the bases and electronic communications intercept stations and the running of oil and gas pipelines through the country from the Caspian Sea region.
The welfare of the people of Afghanistan, by contrast, can have counted for little, considering that the elements put into power by US military might are largely those whose earlier rule before the Taliban was so depraved that many Afghans welcomed the Taliban to power; their newest atrocities, carried out under cover of American firepower, show they haven’t lost their touch. The prime minister of the interim government, Hamid Karzai, though himself not seeming too villainous, may have a credibility problem, given his long close contact with the US State Department, National Security Council, Congress, and other pillars of the American foreign policy establishment. 16 Yet, the connection may work only one way, for when leaders of the interim government asked the United States to halt its bombing in December because of the frequent mass deaths of innocents, Washington refused, saying it had its own timeline. This does not bode well for the future Afghan government and society; neither does Karzai’s appointment of General Rashid Dostum as deputy defense minister, a man amongst whose charms is the habit of punishing his soldiers by tying them to tank tracks and then driving the tanks around his barracks’ square to turn them into mincemeat. 17
Is this any way to end terrorism?
The American scorched-earth bombing of Afghanistan may well turn out to be a political train wreck. Can it be doubted that thousands throughout the Muslim world were emotionally and spiritually recruited to the cause of the next Osama bin Laden by the awful ruination and perceived injustice? That is to say, the next generation of terrorists. Indeed, in December, while the American bombs were still falling on Afghanistan, a man – British citizen Richard Reid, who was a convert to Islam – tried to blow up an American Airlines plane en route to the United States with explosives hidden in his shoes. At the London mosque that Reid had attended, the cleric in charge warned that extremists were enlisting other young men like Reid and that agents aligned with radical Muslim figures had stepped up recruiting efforts since September 11. The cleric said that he knew of “hundreds of Richard Reids” recruited in Britain. Reid, described in the press as a “drifter”, reportedly traveled to Israel, Egypt, the Netherlands, and Belgium before arriving in Paris and boarding the American Airlines plane. 18 This raises the question of who was financing him. The freezing of numerous bank accounts of alleged terrorist groups throughout the world by the United States may have rather limited effect.
Americans do not feel any more secure in their places of work, in their places of leisure, or in their travels than they did a day before their government’s bombings began.
Has the power elite learned anything? Here’s James Woolsey, former Director of the CIA, speaking in December in Washington, advocating an invasion of Iraq and unconcerned about the response of the Arab world: The silence of the Arab public in the wake of America’s victories in Afghanistan, he said, proves that “only fear will re-establish respect for the U.S.” 19
What, then, can the United States do to end terrorism directed against it? The answer lies in removing the anti- American motivations of the terrorists. To achieve this, American foreign policy will have to undergo a metamorphosis.
If I were the president, I could stop terrorist attacks against the United States in a few days. Permanently. I would first apologize to all the widows and orphans, the tortured and impoverished, and all the many millions of other victims of American imperialism. Then I would announce, in all sincerity, to every corner of the world, that America’s global interventions have come to an end, and inform Israel that it is no longer the 51st state of the USA but now – oddly enough – a foreign country. I would then reduce the military budget by at least 90% and use the savings to pay reparations to the victims. There would be more than enough money. One year’s military budget of 330 billion dollars is equal to more than $18,000 an hour for every hour since Jesus Christ was born.
That’s what I’d do on my first three days in the White House. On the fourth day, I’d be assassinated.
Notes
- The Guardian (London), December 19, 2001, article by Duncan Campbell
- U.S. Department of Defense, Defense Science Board, The Defense Science Board 1997 Summer Study Task Force on DOD Responses to Transnational Threats, October 1997, Final Report, Vol. 1, can be found in full at http://www.acq.osd.mil/dsb/trans.pdf. The part quoted is on page 15 of the report (page 31 of the pdf online version)
- New York Times, March 26, 1989, p.16
- Jim Dwyer, et al., Two Seconds Under the World (New York, 1994), p.196
- Marc W. Herold, “A Dossier on Civilian Victims of United States’ Aerial Bombing of Afghanistan: A Comprehensive Accounting”
- David Rose, “Attackers did not know they were to die, The Observer (London) October 14, 2001
- Washington Post, October 2, 1999
- First quote: The Guardian (London), December 20, 2001, p.16; second quote: US Defense Department briefing, November 1, 2001
- New York Times, October 28, 2001, p.B1
- Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 10/31/01, p.10A
- Fox Network: “Special Report with Brit Hume”, November 5, 2001
- Washington Post, November 12, 2001, p.C1
- Miami Herald, September 12, 2001, p.23
- The Der Spiegel interview was translated by Jost Lang and can be found in full at the Emperors Clothes website
- Washington Post, December 26, 2001, p.16
- Ibid., December 22, 2001, p.16
- The Independent (London), November 14, 2001, article by Robert Fisk
- The Times (London), December 27, 2001, p.1; Washington Post, December 28, 2001, p.8
- Washington Post, December 27, 2001, p.C2
