The Chattanooga Shootings: Can Attacking Military Sites of a Nation at War Be "Terrorism"?

By Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept

17 July 15

gunman yesterday attacked two military sites in Chattanooga, Tennessee, killing four U.S Marines. Before anything was known about the suspect other than his name — Mohammod Youssuf Abdulazeez — it was instantly and widely declared by the U.S. media to be “terrorism.” An FBI official announced at a press briefing: “We will treat this as a terrorism investigation until it can be determined it was not.”

That “terrorism” in U.S. political and media discourse means little beyond “violence by Muslims against the West” is now too self-evident to debate (in this case, just the name of the suspect seemed to suffice to trigger application of the label). I’ve documented that point at length many times — most recently, a couple of weeks ago when the term was steadfastly not applied to the white shooter who attacked a black church in Charleston despite his clear political and ideological motives — and I don’t want to rehash those points here. Instead, I want to focus on a narrow question about this term: Can it apply to violent attacks that target military sites and soldiers of a nation at war, rather than civilians?

In common usage (as opposed to legal definitions), “terrorism” typically connotes, if not denotes, “violence against civilians.” If you ask most people why they regard the 9/11 attack as so singularly atrocious, you will likely hear that it was because the violence was aimed indiscriminately at civilians and at civilian targets. If you ask them to distinguish why they regard civilian-killing U.S. violence as legitimate and justified but regard the violence aimed at the U.S. as the opposite (“terrorism”), they’ll likely claim that the U.S. only kills civilians by accident, not on purpose. Whether one is targeting civilian versus military sites is a central aspect to how we talk about the justifiability of violence and what is and is not “terrorism.”

But increasingly in the West, violent attacks are aimed at purely military targets, yet are still being called “terrorism.” To this day, many people are indignant that Nidal Hasan was not formally charged with “terrorism” for his attack on the U.S. military base in Fort Hood, Texas (though he was widely called a “terrorist” by U.S. media reports). Last October in Canada — weeks after the government announced it would bomb Iraq against ISIS — a Muslim man waited for hours in his car in a parking lot until he saw two Canadian soldiers in uniform, and then ran them over, killing one; that was universally denounced as “terrorism” despite his obvious targeting of soldiers. Omar Khadr was sent to Guantanamo as a teenager and branded a “terrorist” for killing a U.S. soldier fighting the war in Afghanistan, during a firefight. One of the most notorious “terrorism” prosecutions in the U.S. — just brilliantly dissected by my colleague Murtaza Hussain — involved an alleged plot to attack the military base at Fort Dix. Trumpeted terror arrests in the U.S. now often involve plots against military rather than civilian targets. The 9/11 attack itself targeted the Pentagon in addition to the World Trade Center.

The argument that even attacks on military bases should be regarded as “terrorism” rests on the proposition that soldiers who are not actively engaged in combat when attacked are not legitimate targets. Instead, it is legitimate only to target them when engaging them on a battlefield. Under the law of war, one cannot, for instance, legally hunt down soldiers while they’re sleeping in their homes, or playing with their children, or buying groceries at a supermarket. Their mere status as “soldiers” does not mean it is legally permissible to target and kill them wherever they are found. It is only permissible to do so on the battlefield, when they are engaged in combat.

That argument has a solid footing in both law and morality. But it is extremely difficult to understand how anyone who supports the military actions of the U.S. and their allies under the “War on Terror” rubric can possibly advance that view with a straight face. The official framework that drives the West’s military behavior is the exact antithesis of that legal and moral standard. When it comes to justifying their own violence, the U.S. and their closest allies have spent the last 15 years, at least, insisting on precisely the opposite view.

The U.S. drone program constantly targets individuals regarded as “illegal combatants” and kills them without the slightest regard for where they are or what they are doing at that moment: at their homes, in their sleep, driving in a car with family members, etc. The U.S. often targets people without even knowing their names or identities, based on their behavioral “patterns”; the Obama administration literally re-defined “combatant” to mean “all military-age males in a strike zone.”  The “justification” for all this is that these are enemy combatants and they therefore can be legitimately targeted and killed no matter where they are found or what they are doing at the time; one need not wait until they are engaged in combat or on a battlefield. The U.S. government has officially embraced that view.

Indeed, the central premise of the War on Terror always has been, and still is, that there is no such thing as a physically limited space called “the battlefield.” Instead, the whole world is one big, limitless “battlefield”: the “battlefield” is wherever enemy combatants are found. That means that the U.S. has codified the notion that one does not have to wait for a “combatant” to enter a designated battlefield and engage in combat; instead, he is a fair target for killing anywhere he is found.

The U.S.’s closest allies have long embraced the same mindset. The Israelis have used targeted assassination of the country’s enemies — killing them wherever they are found — for decades. They’ve murdered multiple Iranian scientists at their homes. They deliberately bombed the home of a Gazan police chief and killed 15 people inside. They previously killed 40 police trainees when bombing a police station. Just this week, my colleague Matthew Cole used NSA documents to prove that Israeli commandos in 2008 shot and killed a Syrian general while he hosted a dinner party at his seaside vacation home. This all is grounded in the view that one need not wait until one’s enemies enter a “battlefield” and engage in combat in order to kill them.

The question here about the Chattanooga shootings and similar attacks is not whether any or all of this is justified. The question is whether the term “terrorism” applies to such acts, and whether the term has any consistent meaning. To question whether something qualifies as “terrorism” quite obviously is not to say it is justifiable: All sorts of violence is wrong without being “terrorism.”

One could argue that attacks such as last night’s in Chattanooga count as “terrorism” despite targeting military sites because they are not carried out by states but rather by individuals or non-state actors. But that’s just another way of saying that the violence the U.S. engages in as part of the War on Terror is inherently justified and legitimate, while the violence engaged in by its declared enemies — non-state actors — never is. This is all about creating self-justifying double standards: Just imagine the outrage that would pour forth if Syria had sent a commando force to kill an American or Israeli general in his home.

And ultimately, that’s the real point here: The U.S. Government, its allies and their apologists constantly propagate standards that have no purpose other than to legitimize all of their violence while de-legitimizing all violence by their enemies in the “war” they have declared. Nothing is more central to that effort than the propagandistic invocation of the term “terrorism.” We’re now at the point where it is “terrorism” when enemies of the U.S. target American military bases and soldiers, but not “terrorism” when the U.S. recklessly engages in violence it knows will kill large numbers of civilians.

US/Israeli/Saudi 'Behavior' Problems

By Robert Parry, Consortium News

17 July 15

In Official Washington’s latest detour from the real world, top pundits are depicting Iran as the chief troublemaker in the Mideast and saying the nuclear deal should hinge on Iranian “behavior.” But the real “behavior” problems come from Israel, Saudi Arabia and the U.S., writes Robert Parry.

here is a madness in how the mainstream U.S. media presents the world to the American people, a delusional perspective that arguably creates an existential threat to humanity’s survival. We have seen this pattern in the biased depiction of the Ukraine crisis and now in how Official Washington is framing the debate over the Iranian nuclear agreement.

In this American land of make-believe, Iran is assailed as the chief instigator of instability in the Middle East. Yet, any sane and informed person would dispute that assessment, noting the far greater contributions made by Israel, Saudi Arabia and, indeed, the United States.

Israel’s belligerence, including frequently attacking its Arab neighbors and brutally repressing the Palestinians, has roiled the region for almost 70 years. Not to mention that Israel is a rogue nuclear state that has been hiding a sophisticated atomic-bomb arsenal.

An objective observer also would note that Saudi Arabia has been investing its oil wealth for generations to advance the fundamentalist Wahhabi sect of Sunni Islam, which has inspired terrorist groups from Al Qaeda to the Islamic State. Fifteen of the 19 hijackers on 9/11 were identified as Saudis and the U.S. government is still concealing those 28 pages of the congressional 9/11 inquiry regarding Saudi financing of Al Qaeda terrorists.

The Saudis also have participated directly and indirectly in regional wars, including encouragement of Iraq’s invasion of Iran in 1980, support for Al Qaeda-affiliate Nusra Front’s subversion of Syria, and the current Saudi bombardment of Yemen, killing hundreds of civilians, touching off a humanitarian crisis and helping Al Qaeda’s Yemeni affiliate expand its territory.

U.S. Meddling

Then there’s the United States, which has been meddling in the Middle East overtly and covertly for a very long time, including one of the CIA’s first covert operations, the overthrow of Iran’s elected government in 1953, and one of U.S. foreign policy’s biggest overt blunders, President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003.

The Iran coup engendered a deep-seated hatred and suspicion of the U.S. government among Iranians that extends to the present day. And, the Iraq invasion not only spread death and destruction across Iraq but has spilled over into Syria, where U.S. “allies” – Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Israel – have been seeking another “regime change” that is being spearheaded by Sunni terrorist groups, including Al Qaeda’s Nusra Front and the Islamic State.

The U.S. government has further aided in the destabilization of the region by flooding U.S. “allies” with powerful military equipment, including aircraft that both Israel and Saudi Arabia have used to bomb neighboring countries.

Yet, in the fantasy land that is Official Washington, the politicians and pundits decry “Iranian aggression,” parroting the propaganda theme dictated by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he spoke before an adoring audience of senators and congressmen at a joint session of Congress on March 3.

This Iranian “bad behavior” includes helping the Iraqi government withstand brutal attacks by the Islamic State and assisting the Syrian government in blocking a major victory for Islamic terrorism that would follow the fall of Damascus. Iran is also being blamed for the Houthi uprising in Yemen although most informed observers believe the Iranian influence and assistance are minimal.

In other words, the neoconservatives who dominate Official Washington’s “group think” may detest Iran’s regional activities since they are not in line with Israeli (and Saudi) desires, but less ideological analysts might conclude that – on balance – Iran is contributing to the stability of the region or at least helping to avert the worst outcomes.

A Lost Mind

The question becomes: Has Official Washington so lost its collective mind that it actually favors Al Qaeda or the Islamic State raising the black flag of Islamic terrorism over Damascus and even Baghdad? Is Iranian assistance in averting such a calamity such a terrible thing?

Apparently yes. Here’s how The Washington Post’s foreign affairs honcho David Ignatius – in a column entitled “Will Tehran Behave?” – describes the geopolitical situation following Tuesday’s signing of a deal to tightly constrain Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for lifting sanctions:

“The problem isn’t the agreement but Iran itself. Its behavior remains defiantly belligerent, even as it signs an accord pledging to be peaceful. Its operatives subvert neighboring regimes, even as their front companies are about to be removed from the sanctions lists. The agreement welcomes Iran to the community of nations, even though its leader proclaims that Iran is a revolutionary cause.

“Obama argues that dealing with a menacing Iran will be easier if the nuclear issue is off the table for the next 10 years. He’s probably right, but the Iran problem won’t vanish with this accord. Iranian behavior in the region becomes the core issue. Having played the dealmaker, Obama must now press Iran to become a more responsible neighbor.”

By the way, I always thought that the United States proclaimed itself “a revolutionary cause.” But here is Ignatius, who is regarded as a “big thinker,” setting the parameters of the acceptable debate about the Iran nuclear deal. It’s all about Iran’s “behavior.”

Ignatius even quotes Netanyahu decrying the danger that, after 10 years, the agreement will give Iran “a sure path to nuclear weapons.” Of course, Ignatius doesn’t bother to note that Israel already has taken its own path to nuclear weapons. That context is almost never mentioned.

Nor does Ignatius admit how he and many of his fellow pundits supported Bush’s invasion of Iraq, which in a normal, parallel universe would disqualify Ignatius and his friends from lecturing anyone about how to “behave.” But in today’s Official Washington, a pre-war endorsement of the Iraq disaster is not a disqualifier but a prerequisite for being taken seriously.

Similarly, The Washington Post’s editorial page, which in 2002-03 eagerly backed Bush’s invasion and routinely asserted as flat fact that Iraq possessed hidden WMD stockpiles, now says the real risk in the Iran deal is, you guessed it, “Iranian behavior.”

The Post says the deal could unleash “a dangerous threshold nuclear state that poses a major threat to the United States and its allies.” And, the Post warns that Iran’s “leaders will probably use” the money from the sanctions relief “to finance wars and terrorist groups in Iraq, Syria, the Gaza Strip, Yemen and elsewhere.”

Step Into Crazy Land

Again, to appreciate the Post’s thinking, you have to step into crazy land. In the real Iraq and the real Syria, the Iranians are supporting internationally recognized governments battling against terrorist groups, Al Qaeda’s affiliate and the Islamic State.

In Yemen, Iranian involvement is probably minor at most. Plus, the Houthis are not a terrorist group, but rather an indigenous popular movement that has been fighting Al Qaeda’s terrorist affiliate in Yemen.

While it’s not clear what the Post thinks that Iran is doing in the Gaza Strip, which is under a tight Israeli military blockade, only fully committed neocons would think that the long-suffering people of the Gaza Strip don’t deserve some outside help.

Still, the larger issue for the American people is what to do with this insane political-media system that dominates Official Washington. Either these powers-that-be are detached from reality or they are deceitful propagandists who think they can manipulate us with lies and distortions.

Yet, by creating a false reality, whether from madness or cynicism, this system guides the nation into terrible decision-making. And, given the immense military power of the United States, this long national detour into a dark psychosis of delusion must be addressed or the future of humankind will be put into serious jeopardy.

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com). You also can order Robert Parry’s trilogy on the Bush Family and its connections to various right-wing operatives for only $34. The trilogy includes America’s Stolen Narrative. For details on this offer, click here.