The Ghosts of 9-1-1

REVIEW - The Ghosts of 9-1-1 as found in:

Before the media understood who had carried out the 9/11 attacks - never mind why - they proclaimed the attacks “unprovoked” and “senseless”. This inexplicable exhortation to innocence was within days encapsulated by Newsweek - “Why, do they hate us so much?”

Ward Churchill:

The question was and remains boggling in its temerity, so much so that after a lifetime of spelling out the reasons, one is tempted to respond with a certain weary cynicism, perhaps repeating Malcolm X’s penetrating observation about chickens coming home to roost and leaving it at that.2 Still, mindful of the hideous human costs attending the propensity of Good Americans, like Good Germans, to dodge responsibility by anchoring professions of innocence in claims of near-total ignorance concerning the crimes of their corporate state, one feels obliged to try and deny them the option of such pretense. It is thus necessary that at least a few of those whose ravaged souls settled in upon the WTC and the Pentagon be named.

If you think yourself innocent because ignorant are you ready and willing to become culpable via knowledge? (If not, would it be impertinent to suggest your innocence lacks innocence?) The question has just been put before you: knowledge with all its weight or ignorance with its pretense to innocence? “I didn’t know,” isn’t going to cut it folks.

Churchill:

Why should “they” hate “us”? The very question is on its face absurd, delusional, revealing of an aggregate detachment from reality so virulent in its evasiveness as to be deemed clinically pathological. Setting aside the wholly-contrived “confusion” professed in the aftermath as to who might be properly included under the headings “we” and “they,” the sole legitimate query that might have been posed on 9-1-1 was—and remains—“How could ‘they’ possibly not hate ‘us’?” From there, honest interrogators might have gone on to frame two others: “Why did it take ‘them’ so long to arrive?” and “Why, under the circumstances, did they conduct themselves with such obvious and admirable restraint?”

Once sufficient knowledge is faced and duly absorbed - a contrived innocence is no longer plausible. Once one knows with sufficient reason that genocide, for example, best describes the consequences of the U.S. lead trade embargo of Iraq, innocence lies exposed. Innocence cannot survive such knowledge. Mass murder is not innocent. Nor is knowing about it and being indifferent to it. Nor is opposing it but doing nothing to stop it. Innocence, in fact, is no where around.

With the metaphor of the Ghosts of 9-1-1 at his disposal, Churchill spells out the consequences of U.S. imperial arrogance and criminality for its victims with the attacks of 9/11 rendered a largely symbolic and relatively minor response to such arrogance and criminality.

Churchill lists some facts or the Trails of Tears (all quotes):

1. At the front of the queue were the wraiths of a half-million Iraqi children, all of them under twelve, all starved to death or forced to die for lack of basic sanitation and/or medical treatment during the past ten years.3 These youngsters suffered and died because the U.S. first systematically bombed their country’s water purification, sewage treatment and pharmaceutical plants out of existence, then imposed a decade-long—and presently ongoing—embargo to ensure that Iraq would be unable to repair or replace most of what had been destroyed.4 The point of this carefully calculated mass murder, as was explained at the outset by then-President George Herbert Walker Bush, father of the current Oval Office occupant, has been to impress upon the Iraqi government—and the rest of the world as well—that “what we say, goes.”5
In other words, though no less bluntly: “Do as you’re told or we’ll kill your babies.”

2. There were others present on 9-1-1, many others, beginning with the 800,000 Iraqi adults—the great majority of them either elderly or pregnant—known to have died along with their youngsters as a direct result of U.S. sanctions. This makes a total of 1.3 million dead among a population of fewer than twenty million in the decade since the Gulf War supposedly ended.44

3. To these must be added another 150,000-or-so Iraqi civilians written off as “collateral damage” during the massive U.S. aerial bombardment defining the war itself.45

4. Then there were the soldiers, conscripts mostly, butchered in the scores of thousands as they fled northward along what became known as the “Highway of Death,” out of combat, in full compliance with U.S. demands that they evacuate Kuwait, effectively defenseless against the waves of aircraft thereupon hurled at them by cowards wearing American uniforms.46

5. Also at hand were some 10,000 Iraqi guardsmen retreating along a causeway outside Basra, killed in another “turkey shoot” conducted by U.S. forces 24 hours after the “war-ending ceasefire” had taken effect.47

6. Untold thousands of others were there as well, terrified teenagers, many of them wounded, refused quarter by advancing American troops who disparaged them as “sand niggers,” then buried them alive while they pleaded for mercy, using bulldozers specially prepared for the task.48

7. Present on 9-1-1 were the many thousands of Palestinians shredded over the years by Israeli pilots flying planes purchased with U.S. funds and dropping cluster bombs manufactured in/provided by the USA.49 There, too, were the “Intifadists,” rockthrowing—or simply fist-waving—Palestinian kids mowed down with numbing regularity by Israeli troops firing hyperlethal ammunition from American-supplied M-16 rifles.50

8. Consider the 300,000 Guatemalans exterminated after the CIA destroyed their democratically-elected government in 1954, installing in its stead a brutal military junta dedicated to making the country safe for the operations of U.S. corporations.52

9. Consider, too, the million or more Indonesian victims of a CIA-sponsored 1965 coup in which the Sukarno government was overthrown in favor of a military régime headed by Suharto, a maneuver that led unerringly—and with uninterrupted American support—to the recent genocide in East Timor.53

No less apparent are the reasons for the presence of the multitudes subjected to numerically lesser but nonetheless comparable carnage by an array of other U.S. client governments:

10. persons tortured and murdered by Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s secret police, the SAVAK, after the CIA-engineered dissolution of Iran’s parliamentary system in 1954;54

11. more thousands “disappeared” and summarily executed after the CIA-instigated 1973 overthrow of Chile’s Allende government and installation of a military junta headed by Augusto Pinochet;55

12. thousands more murdered by agents of the ghastly “public safety” programs implemented with U.S. funding and supervision throughout South America during the 1960s;56

13. still more who lost their lives to the U.S.-sponsored and orchestrated “contra” war against Nicaragua’s Sandinista government during the mid-1980s.57

Although the list of such malignancies is still and rapidly lengthening, it is appropriate that we return to the roster of those whose fates were sealed by the U.S. in a far more direct and exclusive fashion.

14. They include, quite conspicuously, three million Indochinese, perhaps more, exterminated in the course of America’s savage and sustained assaults on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia during the 1960s and early 1970s.58

15. To those claimed by the war itself must be added the ongoing toll taken by America’s “stay behind” legacy of landmines, unexploded artillery rounds and cluster bomblets, as well as an environment soaked in carcinogenic-mutogenic defoliants.59

16. Added, too, must be those lost to the U.S. default on its pledge to pay reparations of $4 billion in exchange for being allowed to escape with “honor” from a war it started but could not win.60 America has never been known for paying its bills, either literally or figuratively.

17. Present, too, on 9-1-1 were the uncounted thousands of noncombatants massacred by U.S. troops at places like No Gun Ri amidst the “police action” conducted in Korea during the early 1950s.61

18. As well, there were the hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians deliberately and systematically burned alive by the Army Air Corps during its massive fire raids on Tokyo and other cities conducted towards the end of World War II.62

19. these victims were accompanied by the dead of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, indiscriminately vaporized by American nuclear bombs in 1945—or left the slow, excruciating deaths resulting from irradiation—not to any military purpose, but rather to the end that the U.S. might demonstrate the technological supremacy of its “kill-power” to anyone thinking of questioning its dominance of the postwar world.63

20. Then there were the Filipinos, as many as a million of them, “extirpated” by American troops at the dawn of the twentieth century, as the U.S., having wrested their island homeland from the relatively benign clutches of the Spanish Empire, set about converting the Philippines into a colony of its own.65

21. Nor was there an absence of “Indians,” people indigenous to America itself, whose unending agony was enunciated in the silent eloquence of several hundred Lakota babies, mothers and old men dumped into a mass grave—a crude trench, really—after they’d been annihilated by soldiers firing Hotchkiss guns at Wounded Knee in 1890.66

22. Punctuating their statement were the victims of a hundred comparable slaughters stretching back in an unbroken line through Weaverville and Yrika to the Washita and Sand Creek, through the Bad Axe to Horseshoe Bend and beyond, all the way to General John Sullivan’s campaign against the Senecas in 1794, a grisly affair from which his men returned proudly attired in leggings crafted from the skins of their victims.67

23. Intermixed with those massacred wholesale were many thousands of native people slain piecemeal, hunted down as sport or for the bounties placed upon their scalps at one time or another by every state and territory in the Lower Forty-Eight.68 Many more thousands could be counted among those who’d perished along the routes of the death marches—the Cherokee “Trail of Tears,” for instance, and the “Long Walk” of the Navajos—upon which they were forced at bayonet-point, “removed” from their land so that it might be repopulated by a self-anointedly superior race busily importing itself from Europe.69

24. Then there were the millions dead of disease, smallpox mostly, with which they’d been infected, often deliberately, as a means of causing them more literally to “vanish.”70

In the end, the grim column of stolen lives reached such length that it threatened to disappear into the distance.

25. Towards its end, however, could still be glimpsed a scattering of Wappingers, a small people now mostly forgotten, eradicated by the Dutch in their founding of New Amsterdam, now New York, the victims’ severed heads used for a jolly game of kickball along a street near which the WTC would later stand.71

26. As for the street upon which this gruesome event took place, it is now named in honor of a prominence by which it would long be flanked, the wall enclosing the city’s once-thriving slave market.72 The lucrative trade in African flesh—that, and extraction of discount labor from such flesh—were, after all, ingredients nearly as vital to forming the U.S. economy as was the “clearing” and expropriation of native land.73

-Thus, the millions lost to the Middle Passage took their places among their myriad Asian and Native American cousins.74

27. They, and all who perished under slavers’ whips after being sold at auction in the “New World,” were worked or tortured to death on chain gangs after slavery was formally abolished,75 or were among the thousands lynched during a century-long “festival of violence” undertaken by white Americans—there were six million active members of the Ku Klux Klan in 1929—to ensure that ostensibly “free” blacks remained “in their place” of subjugation.76 The atrocious record of apartheid South Africa always came in a feeble second to the malignancies of Jim Crow.77

Intermixed, too, were a great host of others:

28. the thousands of Chinese coolies imported during the nineteenth century, none of them standing “a Chinaman’s chance” of surviving the brutal conditions into which they were impressed while laying track for America’s railroads and digging its deep shaft mines throughout the West;78

29. the millions of children consigned in each generation to grinding poverty and truncated lifespans across America’s vast sprawl of ghettoes, barrios, Indian reservations and migrant labor camps;79

30. millions upon millions more assigned the same or worse in the neocolonies of the Third World, the depths of their misery dictated by an unremitting demand for superprofits with which to fuel America’s “economic miracle.”80

“Why do they hate us so much?”

Churchill notes the collusion of “U.S. governmental agencies, corporate media and academic élites”, in providing only such information as is convenient to the status quo.6 Despite this, however, Churchill denies that the American people have the luxury of claiming ignorance/innocence when it comes to the consequences of the U.S. lead 10-year-long trade embargo against Iraq. The main consequence in human terms: “half-million Iraqi children … starved to death or forced to die for lack of basic sanitation and/or medical treatment.” In this in particular, the American people knew about it. The predicted consequences of such an embargo were known and offered to the public. Further, “two high UN officials, including Assistant Secretary General Denis Halliday, [had] resigned in protest of what Halliday described in widely-reported statements as “the policy of deliberate genocide” they reflected.7

When Secretary of State Albright acknowledged this horrific toll in dead children as “worth the cost”, how did the American people respond?

Churchill:

One wonders how information about what was happening in Iraq could have been made much clearer or more readily accessible to the general public. Claims that average Americans “didn’t know” what was being done in their name are thus rather less than credible. In reality, Americans by-and-large greeted Albright’s haughty revelation of genocide with yawns and blank stares, returning their attention almost immediately to what they considered far weightier matters: the Dow Jones and American League batting averages, for instance, or pursuit of the perfect cappuccino. Braying like donkeys into their eternal cellphones, they went right on arranging their stock transfers and real estate deals and dinner dates, conducting business as usual, never exhibiting so much as a collective flicker of concern.

Churchill describes this form of ignorance as “that of willful and deliberate ignoration - not synonymous with being uninformed. It is instead to be informed and then ignore the information.”

The Left

Following this “willful and deliberate ignoration” Churchill takes certain segments of the left to task. Why? Basically for failing to support direct action in protest, serving up instead a symbolic/ritual protest that changes nothing. What it does do, however, is allow for a burgeoning cottage industry of lefties espousing and espousing but less often doing.

Churchill:

Turning to America’s vaunted “opposition,” [i.e., lefties] we find record of not a single significant demonstration protesting the wholesale destruction of Iraqi children. On balance, U.S. “progressives” have devoted far more time and energy over the past decade to combating the imaginary health effects of “environmental tobacco smoke”20 and demanding installation of speedbumps in suburban neighborhoods21—that is, to increasing their own comfort level—than to anything akin to a coherent response to the U.S. genocide in Iraq. The underlying mentality is symbolized quite well in the fact that, since they were released in the mid-1990s, Jean Baudrillard’s allegedly “radical” screed, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, has outsold Ramsey Clark’s The Impact of Sanctions on Iraq, prominently subtitled The Children are Dying, by a margin of almost three-to-one.

Churchill’s criticism’s of America’s left center’s on its cultural embeddedness within and commitment to preserving a political culture that pays lip-service to all sorts of lofty principles such as democracy, multi-culturalism, and due process. Further, most political perspectives including the left, will speak glowingly of “a discernible opposition in the U.S., an active counterforce to the status quo through which progressive social, political and economic change can ultimately be accomplished without resort to the crudities of bullets and bombs … ”

The problem, however, is that the left’s embeddedness within and commitment to its own lofty place within this regal self-ascribed political panacea, renders it impotent when it comes to the challenge of mounting real, direct opposition rather than one that is built almost exclusively on the trade in words. It speaks loads but does little. Segments of the left - committed only to words about action but not action itself - thereby illustrate the extent to which America’s political process serves mostly itself with left commentary amounting to an enfeebled American version of conscience. Where was this counterforce, for example, when America instituted a policy of genocide against the Iraqi people?

In short, amongst the left, there is a sizable portion who are basically engaged in a solipsistic (but also narcissistic?) enterprise - along with all the other ideologues within that frighteningly narrow band that constitutes American political discourse. It feeds them well financially and socially but their words amount to so much irrelevance with respect to the life and death of matters.

Churchill:

So intoxicated had they been rendered by their mutual indulgence in the narcotic of American exceptionalism,36 that they’d lost all touch with laws as basic and natural as cause and effect. “Out there,” in the neocolonial hinterlands where the body count of the New World Order must mostly be tallied, no one really cares a whit that a sector of the beneficiary population has chosen to bear a sort of perpetual “moral witness” to the crimes committed against the Third World. What they do care about is whether such witnesses translate their professions of “outrage” into whatever kinds of actions may be necessary to actually put an end to the horror.37

When such action is not forthcoming from within the perpetrator society itself—when in fact those comprising that society’s purported opposition can be seen to have mostly joined in enforcing at a bedrock level the very order from whence mass murder systematically emanates—a different sort of rule must inevitably come to govern.38 There is nothing mysterious in this. The proposition is so obvious, uncomplicated and fundamentally just that it has been often and straightforwardly articulated, usually to the accompaniment of cheers, before mass audiences in the U.S. Recall as but one example the line delivered by the actor Lawrence Fishburn, portraying Prohibition-era Harlem gangster Bumpy Johnson in a 1984 movie, The Cotton Club: “When you push people around, some people [will eventually] push back.”39

On Matters of Balance, Proportion and “Security”

In the section On Matters of Balance, Proportion and “Security”, Churchill addresses - and soundly rejects - the “suggestion that those who attacked the Pentagon and WTC on 9-1-1 were seeking to ‘get even’ with the U.S.” Churchill rejects the notion that 9/11 even remotely approaches “getting even”. To “get even” for all the dead Iraqi children, in numbers proportional to relative populations, the attack would have had to kill 7.5 million American children. When taking into account the millions of adults also dead as a consequence of the Iraq trade embargo, a proportional level of suffering would amount to 22.5 million dead Americans. Further, the attacks would not have been restricted to America’s “command and control infrastructure”. It would have included:

the well-established U.S. pattern of ’surgically’ obliterating sewage, water sanitation and electrical generation plants, food production/storage capacity, hospitals, pharmaceutical production facilities, communications centers and much more upon which Americans are no less dependent than Iraqis for survival.84 The result, aside from mass death, would be a surviving population wracked by malnutrition and endemic disease (just as in Iraq today).

Thus, 9/11 is interpreted as largely a symbolic act: As, “a desperate bid to command attention on the part of those so utterly dehumanized and devalued in the minds of average Americans that the very fact of their existence has never been deemed worthy of a moment’s contemplation.” On the basis of this symbolic act, maybe America would be shocked out of its self absorbed exceptionalist creed. Of course, we know by now that that did not happen.

Still, Churchill claims that the 9/11 attacks were largely symbolic and that the message operated on two levels.

On one level, the attacks - however, diminutive in comparison to America’s foreign atrocities - intended the quiry “How does it feel?” The point being that America, actually does not know how it feels. It actually has no experiential basis for understanding - through reception - that which its leadership regularly inflicts upon populations elsewhere. In Churchill’s terms, for Americans “the grisly panoramas of war, mass murder and genocide have become sanitized to the point of sterility, imbued with no more concrete reality than any other ‘home entertainment’ offering.89″

How else to explain the popularity of increasingly technicalized military jargon like ‘kill ratios,’ ‘force degradation’ and ‘collateral damage’ among the general public?90 How else to understand the public’s willingness to accept the absurd proposition that a teenager safely ensconced at a computer console while launching missiles meant to slaughter unseen/unknown others at a thousand miles distance somehow or another qualifies as a ‘hero’?91 Americans have in effect collectively lost their grip, and with it all sense of the charnal stench wafting from the policies, procedures and priorities they’ve consistently endorsed. The attacks of 9-1-1, while certainly designed to inflict the maximum material damage possible, given their very limited scope,92 were even more clearly intended to force U.S. citizens into some semblance of reacquaintence with the kind of excruciation their country—and thus they themselves—have become far too accustomed to dispensing with impunity.

The second level of the attackers message follows from the anticipated impact of the attack. American’s, having had but a taste of what they so wantonly inflict, might not wish to have such continue and might thereby come to recognize that the only way to stop terrorism is to stop committing and supporting such terrorism. “In effect, Americans will have to accord a respect for the rights of others equal to that which they demand for themselves, valuing ‘Other’ youngsters as much as they do their own.95″

Quite obviously, neither of these “messages” were received. Instead of recognizing its role in terrorist activity and in committing mass murder and instead of connecting these actions to the 9/11 response, we get a crudely moralistic interpretation which simultaneously absolves the U.S. while characterizing those the U.S. has brutalized as “evil”. The perversity of this moral stance (to “rid the world of evil”), however, ought to be faced straight on. America pontificates about evil while committing evil and/or denying its own atrocities (i.e., denying its own evilness). “Americans have enthusiastically embraced a policy devolving upon the systematic and potentially massive perpetration of war crimes and crimes against humanity.” And they do so in the name of goodness!

This interpretation and response, Churchill thinks, amounts to America’s committing suicide. Perhaps the evidence has yet to demonstrate to what extent America’s failure to interpret its heinous actions as heinous will accelerate its undoing. At any rate, Churchill thinks that the American response only serves to seal its fate. It will not - cannot - stop terrorism through terrorism. Rather it will - it has - further invite(d) it.

The “Miracle of Immaculate Genocide”

If you want security, first look yourself in the mirror. Churchill’s message to America is clear - you don’t get security by committing atrocity nor by denying atrocity. You get it only by facing the truth of who you are, of what you have done - and changing your ways. After all, if a nation’s brutality is not faced by its own citizens, these same citizens “live” in a false America. They live within the fairytale not the reality.

Seems simple and obvious enough doesn’t it?

There’s a problem, however. What happens when a long history of brutality is the norm for a nation? What happens when [quoting Susan Griffin] “whole disciplines, institutions, rubrics in [American] culture … serve as categories of denial,”111 from which Americans can extricate themselves from accountability and responsibility?

Here Churchill’s criticism’s strike at both conservatives and so called progressives showing how the crudeness and obviousness of conservative methods of denial in the face of unpalatable facts is nothing in comparison to the slick and subtle denial methods of “progressives”.

Churchill’s key example is the U.S.’s genocidal attack on the people of the Philippines:

Noting that the Philippines genocide was a matter of public knowledge by 1901,116 Creighton Miller goes on to observe that collective “amnesia over the horrors of the war of conquest…set in early, during the summer of 1902.”117 He then concludes by reflecting upon how “anti-imperialists aided the process by insisting that the conflict and its attendant atrocities had been the result of a conspiracy by a handful of leaders who carried out, through deceit and subterfuge, the policy and means of expansion overseas against the will of the majority of their countrymen.”118

[Quoting Miller] By refusing to acknowledge that most Americans had been bitten by the same bug that afflicted Roosevelt, Lodge, and Beveridge, anti-imperialists were letting the people off the hook and in their own way preserving the American sense of innocence. Unfortunately, the man in the street shared the dreams of world-power status, martial glory, and future wealth that would follow expansion. When the dream soured, the American people neither reacted with very much indignation, nor did they seem to retreat to their cherished political principles. If anything, they seemed to take their cues from their leader in the White House by first putting out of mind all the sordid episodes in the conquest, and then forgetting the entire war itself.119

Churchill: “So it was then, the more so today.” Iraq from 1991 to the present.

The blunt evasive tactics of “conservatives” is again compared to the more subtle conceptual means of evasion employed by “progressives”. Conservative defenses of such atrocities, start with treating them as rare exceptions but when pressed as to “how many such ‘anomalies’ might be required before they can be said to comprise ‘the rule’ itself,” the defense shifts to the claims others do things just as bad. Progressives, however, are more refined in changing the subject. Genocide thus becomes something not perpetrated and supported by actual Americans but rather a product of “capitalism”, “the state”, “structural oppression”, “the hierarchy”. Instead of facing the reality of American genocidal activity, this activity is abstracted so as not to include people - Americans - as the perpetrators and supporters.

Churchill: “Excusing one’s self for one’s crimes is never a legitimate prerogative, nor are attempts to hide or explain them away. This is all the more true while the crimes are being repeated.” America(n’s) thus need to face themselves, face their atrocities for what they are and stop being such willful and willing ignoramuses concerning the reasons and causes for violent actions committed against them.

“Why do they hate us so much?”

In the Alternative

Recognizing America’s criminality (see above), Churchill discusses philosopher Karl Jaspers “schematic of culpability, acceptance of which he suggested might allow both Germans and Germany to redeem themselves.135″ (only touched upon here). The point, need it be further emphasized, is that America too is culpable on a number of levels all of which need to be acknowledged and acted upon if America aims to redeem itself.

First, criminal guilt: Individuals cannot sidestep criminal guilt even if such crimes are conceived within and employed by the state. However, when crimes are committed by state authorities, the state is not in any position to address the crimes - what is required is “an impartially-composed international court”.

Second, political guilt: Citizens are collectively responsible “to ensure by all means necessary that its government adheres to the rule of law, not just domestically but internationally.140 There are no bystanders. No one is entitled to an ‘apolitical’ exemption from such obligation.141 Where default occurs, either by citizen endorsement of official criminality or by the failure of citizens to effectively oppose it, liability is incurred by all.”

Third, moral guilt: In the case of mass public culpability in the crimes of the state, all are socially/morally accountable.

Fourth, metaphysical guilt: This applies to those who looked the other way while their nations leaders committed such crimes or who failed to oppose such sufficiently.

Churchill:

Such issues must be faced straightforwardly, without dissembling, if Americans are ever to hold rightful title to the “good conscience” they’ve so long laid claim to owning. How they are to respond to what stares back at them from the proverbial mirror is an altogether different question, however. Transformation from beastliness to beauty can be neither instantaneous nor, in terms of its retroactive undoing, complete.152 There is no painless, privilege-preserving pill that can be taken to effect a quick fix of what ails the U.S., no petition, no manifesto, no song or candle-lit vigil that will suffice. The terms of change must and will be harsh, inevitably so, given the propensity of those who seek to prevent it to gauge their success by the rotting corpses of toddlers.153 This truth, no matter its inconvenience to those snugly situated within the comfort zones of political pretense,154 is all that defines the substance of meaningful struggle.155

Churchill goes much further in terms of the measures he thinks America must take to make good on its heinous actions, such as placing America under international standards and accountability (e.g., “to reverse its 1986 repudiation of the compulsory jurisdiction previously held over U.S. foreign policy by the International Court of Justice (ICJ); e.g., to place “itself under the jurisdiction of the newly-established International Criminal Court (ICC).158; e.g., by “Americans taking such action as is necessary to compel their government to ratify those elements of international public and humanitarian law it has, often alone, heretofore refused to endorse.”). In addition, given, “those acknowledged to have perpetrated war crimes and crimes against humanity before its domestic bar of justice.164″ … “an initial selection of present/former U.S. officials” should be prosecuted by the ICC. As a preliminary sample he suggests that former Secretary of State Albright, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and current North Caroline Senator Jesse Helms be the first three.

Finally, in what can pass as a concluding statement:

Against this backdrop, otherwise preposterous assertions that recourse to “the World Court is the way to proceed” in halting America’s persistently murderous aggression take on a certain coherence. The question begged in such formulations, as they stand, and as they’ve stood all along, concerns enforcement. A court is not a police force. Less, is it an army. Neither its jurisdiction nor its judgments are self-executing. Its decrees are vacuous without a means of exacting compliance.172 Should it turn out that Americans were prodded by the pain inflicted on 9-1-1 to finally begin shouldering the responsibility of forcing their government to obey the law—with all that this implies—it may be said that a world historic corner was turned on that date. Should this not prove to be the case, however, others, especially those Others most egregiously victimized by American lawlessness, will have no real alternative but to try and do the job themselves. And, in the collectivity of their civic default, Americans, no more than the Good Germans of 1945, can have little legitimate complaint as to how they may have to go about it.173