Selection from the 9/11 report
Jul 23 at 10:10am by Anonymous
September 11th 2001
From page 362:
“But the enemy is not just “terrorism,” some generic evil. This vagueness blurs the strategy.The catastrophic threat at this moment in history is more specific. It is the threat posed by Islamist terrorism—especially the al Qaeda network, its affiliates, and its ideology.
As we mentioned in chapter 2, Usama Bin Ladin and other Islamist terrorist leaders draw on a long tradition of extreme intolerance within one stream of Islam (a minority tradition), from at least Ibn Taimiyyah, through the founders of Wahhabism, through the Muslim Brotherhood, to Sayyid Qutb. That stream is motivated by religion and does not distinguish politics from religion, thus distorting both. It is further fed by grievances stressed by Bin Ladin and widely felt throughout the Muslim world—against the U.S. military presence in the Middle East, policies perceived as anti-Arab and anti-Muslim, and support of Israel.”
The slight against “evil” as a useful term is of course a slight against Bush’’s useless rhetoric, but in a footnote, they specifically reference a Feb 2003 document, the “National Strategy for Combating Terrorism“, which begins rather melodramatically:
“The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, in Washington, D.C., New York City, and Pennsylvania were acts of war against the United States of America and its allies, and against the very idea of civilized society. No cause justifies terrorism. The world must respond and fight this evil that is intent on threatening and destroying our basic freedoms and our way of life.”
So, bravo to the commission for trying to quell the insipid use of rhetoric that helps no one understand anything.
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