War On Terror War Is Terror
"From the wrong premise correctly follow the wrong conclusions, the unchecked inversion working by itself and the war administering political results when it should be the governed one."
"A war that would also bring the regional changes we want has become the deus ex machina of our foreign policy because it is the consequence of a larger and more important mistake made by the administration, that of choosing the wrong enemy."
"On October 12th, a couple of days after the bombing started, Bush publicly announced to the Afghan people that we will continue to bomb you, unless your leadership turns over to us the people who we suspect of carrying out crimes, although we refuse to give you any evidence.
Notice that is a textbook illustration of international terrorism, by the US official definition. That is the use of the threat of force or violence, in this case extreme violence, to obtain political ends through intimidation, fear and so on. That's the official definition, a textbook illustration of it.
Three weeks later, by the end of October, the war aims had changed. They were first announced as far as I can find out, by the British Defense Minister, Sir Admiral Boyce. Admiral Boyce informed the Afghan population that we will continue to bomb you until you change your leadership. Well, that's an even more dramatic illustration of international terrorism."
"It's very simple. If they do it, it's terrorism. If we do it, it's counter-terrorism."
"In pushing ahead with militarized "regime change" the government of President George W. Bush, along with that of Tony Blair in Great Britain, refused to adhere to the authority of the UN Security Council, the sole agency on earth afforded the international mandate to authorize legal warfare."
"Did, for instance, the US government perceive that it was extinguishing the ancestral title—the Aboriginal title—of the peoples of Iraq in the course of the military takeover of their ancestral lands? How was the legal title to the country, but particularly to its oil resources, affected in the process of the US-led attack and occupation? Will the doctrine of conquest eventually be cited in explaining the imperative of the occupying power in playing a decisive role in determining who can or cannot represent the Iraqi people in their treaty-making relations with the outside world? Will the doctrine of conquest be cited in justifying the role of the US government in deciding the eligibility of companies seeking contracts for the extraction and export of Iraqi oil?"
"In 1987 the US government clarified its dependence on the doctrine of conquest, a justification for power that essentially makes the rule of force superior to the rule of law. That clarification came in the form of a reply from the U.S. State Department to the United Nations Human Rights Commission. The State Department was responding to a complaint brought forward by Hopi traditionalists... In answering the Hopi complaint, the executive branch of the American government declared, "conquest renders the tribes subject to the legislative powers of the United States and in substance, terminates the external powers of the sovereignty of the tribe."
"The shift from consent to conquest as the formal way of explaining the relationship of power between Indigenous peoples and the US government is consistent with an approach which has seen the United States favour the rule of force over the rule of law across many fields of human affairs."
"The world is not given to us directly by experience alone, but is, in part, mediated by language. The language we use influences how we think; it mediates our view of the world in both (re)production and interpretation, shaping our beliefs and perceptions. Political language, then, involves structures of domination and legitimation, designed to achieve specific political goals."
"This paper analyses the political discourse of this so-called 'war on terrorism' and attempts to relocate and redefine it. The analysis is based on speeches delivered by the American President, George W. Bush, the Deputy Secretary of Defence, Paul Wolfowitz, and the Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon. The analysis employs a twofold approach: one uses Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), while the second utilises Professor Tomás Albaladejo’s concept of polyacroasis, which highlights the consensual nature of the ideological subjectivity of the speakers."
"Since Plato's time, people have had the idea that words carry within them the germs of their origins, like those seeds hidden in Egyptian tombs that are ready to sprout thousands of years later."
"Take the way President Bush has been describing the Iraqi insurgents as "thugs and assassins." He's used the phrase a number of times"
"The original thugs were the disciples of thugee, a criminal secret society in northern India whose members waylaid travelers and strangled them with scarves. The British finally managed to suppress the thugs in the 1830's after a ten-year campaign of mass arrests and executions."
"As it happens, the original assassins were also the members of a secret order, an Isma'ili Shi'ite sect that controlled northern Syria during the time of the early Crusades in the 11th century. The sect was founded by Hassan i-Sabbah, a Persian ascetic who ruled from a remote stronghold and was called the Old Man of the Mountain."