On September 11th, an apparent gang of nineteen people set to work, equipped with the little tools you use to unseal the tape on cardboard boxes. About an hour later, they destroyed several giant buildings and four jumbo airplanes, murdering several thousand people from all over the world and from all walks of life.

All nineteen people died in the process, but this was according to their plan, and they are not alone. There are thousands and maybe tens of thousands of others worldwide who are to various degrees and for various grievances inclined to take their places. There is no shortage of others who may become so inclined, depending on where the grief and anger leads. And there is no shortage of box-cutting tools and no shortage of targets and no shortage of time.

For most people, the required kind of action and care don’t fit well with the necessary kind of grief and anger. It’s hard to say what needs to be said—about history, and morality, and politics—and even harder to hear it. But there is also one space in the hearts of each person on the planet, one opportunity to connect …

Everyone—and perhaps for the first time in a few thousand years, literally everyone—needs and wants to rethink how to defend themselves.

So this article is an attempt to see what can be said just on the basis of principles of self defense. Principles of morality (justice, law) are equally or even more vital, but let’s set them aside for other occasions (see Agenda, Apr 1986-Sep 2001, also Nov 2001 ff.). We can excuse this strategy because, and only because it’s clear, after the mass murders, that thinking seriously about self-defense leads us in the same direction as would thinking hard about morality and law.

Let’s begin with three relevant principles of self-defense, that apply both to individual people acting on a local scale and to nations of people acting on a global scale. We need to coin names for future reference, but hopefully they seem fairly familiar and even obvious, once stated:

(1) Principle of Isolating: It makes sense to isolate the threat (i.e., identify and expose it), if you can do so without thereby isolating yourself.

(2) Principle of Strengthening: It makes sense to strengthen your defenses, if you can do so without thereby strengthening the source of the threat.

(3) Principle of Weakening: It makes sense to weaken the source of the threat, if you can do so without thereby weakening your defenses.

So much for starters. Let’s see where each of these principles leads, in turn.

The first half of the Isolating Principle basically says that you need to correctly identify the perpetrators, rather than distracting yourself by herding scapegoats. The nineteen mass murderers were all male—and this is a predictable pattern—but even putting morality aside it would be a stupid waste of vital resources to scapegoat males in general. There are way too many of them for that—around 3.5 billion. It seems that many of the mass murderers had skin of certain colors or flags of certain colors, but it would be stupid and self-defeating to judge others by the color of their skin or flag. There are also billions of brown people and billions of Middle Eastern people and over a billion Muslim people. Racists of the world, GET REAL! Here we all are in a very serious emergency situation … and you’re out stupidly wasting your time!??

Even setting aside considerations of basic decency, the same waste-of-ammo argument obviously applies to Fundamentalist Christians like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson who scapegoat Americans they think offensive to their deity.

Local safety in numbers

The second half of the Isolating Principle basically says that there is safety in numbers. This applies most clearly when there is a discriminating threat, when potential perpetrators are particularly trying to get you (or some particular group you belong to). In that case, where possible, it is wise to mix yourself up with others (or others not in the targeted group), reducing your share of the total risk. Numbers can also increase the chance of early warning, or make a potential perpetrator worry about increased chance of being foiled or captured.

Now in one sense the mass murderers (and their potential followers) are indiscriminant. They do not seem to have been aiming for any particular person, and certainly not for you yourself (unless you happen to be George W … but then even the early reports that there were coded threats to Air Force One turn out to have been fabricated). So on an individual scale, for each of us, there is not safety in numbers. Home feels safer than stadiums and skyscrapers. (Of course, there is relative safety in numbers for those facing the parasitic threat of local-level scapegoaters,)

But on a national scale, the situation is different. Although people of many nationalities were murdered, it is very important that the mass murders took place in the United States, and not in Canada, or Mexico, or Denmark, or Palestine, or Israel. Even in other countries, the target of choice tends to be US embassies, not Dutch or Korean ones. Worldwide, ships and bases of the US military are hit, rather than British or Russian bases. Even with no further evidence, this is a sign that the current threat is aimed particularly at things "American".

So the Principle of Isolation counsels that for America’s own self-defense, even leaving aside the clear requirements of international law, it should act as far as possible by mixing itself with international institutions. Actions it takes in concert with the United Nations, for example, are less likely to bring reprisals specifically to America, and more likely to result in early warnings and capture of potential perpetrators. So any Americans who think you should act unilaterally and not through the UN, GET REAL! Whatever objections you may have to international entanglements and commitments, whatever prideful us-against-the-world feelings you may have—here we are in an emergency situation, where there is safety in numbers … and you’re openly increasing the risk to yourself and your fellow Americans!??

Also, if the UN is really to help provide cover for the US, international agreement has to be reached not by having the US coerce or bribe other countries, for then potential perpetrators would see that their aim has to remain focused on the American Godfather. Instead, the international community needs to act freely, so any US pressure must take the form of rational persuasion. This means that if the US really does have evidence of who’s "behind" the mass murders, it needs to present this evidecne to the world. So any of you politicians and spooks who are reluctant to divulge what information you have or what toys you use to gather it, GET REAL! Your job is to protect Americans, not to protect your "sources and methods" and gadgetry. If you do have evidence, withholding it is endangering us all. Here we are in an emergency situation and either you don’t have the evidence you’ve been touting … or you aren’t serious about your job of protecting us!??

The NATO commander, Lord Robertson, has said that he’s seen "conclusive proof" of bin Laden’s involvement … but this was only one day after he said that NATO "needs no proof from an ally". Not to be outdone, Russian president Putin said he "needs no proof" to go after bin Laden, and presumably the rebellious Chechen people in general. But the nations that can really help with bin Laden, especially Afghanistan and Pakistan and Iran and China, and third-world nations generally, are rightly demanding evidence.

Likewise, this safety in numbers can only come if the UN remains in control of bringing any remaining perpetrators to justice, rather than merely having the Security Council issue US authorities a blank check to act as they like. And the US must immediately pay its outstanding dues to the UN—for a change, in the name of self-defense, let’s have some "bipartisanship" where the Congressional antiDemocrats bend a little, instead of only the Congressional antiRepublicans.

Finally, to forge international unity (and so increase US safety) the US must overcome the widespread international view that the US is not serious about eradicating "terrorism", but only about fighting against terrorism from official US enemies rather than official US friends, and from the US itself. Shorn of double standards that only serve to undermine international consensus, "terrorism" means deliberately harming or threatening innocents to achieve political ends. When Ann Arbor’s own Madeleine Albright said on 60 Minutes that the US government made a "hard choice" that the death of half a million Iraqi children should die because the US isn’t happy with Saddam Hussein, and that the price was "worth it", she is confessing that the killing is deliberate. When former UN representative Bill Richardson says that the sanctions will remain as long as Hussein is in power, this is a confession that the deaths have nothing to do with whether Saddam Hussein builds "palaces" or makes life breezy for UN arms inspectors.

US politicians have for years blocked the formation of an International Criminal Court, officially objecting that US personnel might be tried for international crimes. In effect, our government has ruined the international ability to prosecute the Pinochets and Husseins and Sankohs and bin Ladens of the world in order to protect the Kissingers and Bushes and Albrights and Clintons of the country. This endangers us further. Is shielding Kissinger or Albright from prosecution worth your family’s life? If we really want the Taliban to extradite bin Laden to international authorities, perhaps we should arrange a swap?

Our second principle of self-defense, the Strengthening Principle, says you need to strengthen your defenses if you can do so without thereby strengthening the source of the threat. Strengthening defenses means finding ways to reduce the chances that the perpetrators will harm you even if they try. But it’s important that gains in defense not be cancelled out by increasing the chance that perpetrators will try. And it’s also important that gains in defense against one threat not be cancelled out by losses in defense against other independent threats.

Here are a few examples of cancelling out gains in defense. Since the mass murders, handgun sales are way up around the country. GET REAL! This doesn’t help prevent airplane hijackings one bit, assuming—assuming—you can’t get the guns on board. But it does make it less likely that a bin Laden operative will successfully sneak into your garage and make off with your box cutter. Unfortunately, it makes it more likely that you will shoot off your foot or that your toddler will shoot your infant—and this is by far the bigger threat. Second, many people are trying to defend themselves by driving rather than flying, even though—GET REAL!—driving is statistically far more dangerous than flying, even when all the hijackings in history are factored in.

Third, people are calling for draconian restrictions on Americans who share skin color or flag with the nineteen, including unlimited detention of immigrants, and special spying on students. I could and should rail against this morally, but I promised to stick to thinking about self-defense. Okay, how about this … GET REAL! Are a bunch of blond Finns from the Upper Peninsula, or a bunch of drawling rednecks, supposed to infiltrate bin Laden’s network? Can enough monolingual English speakers pass enough Berlitz Arabic-language courses quickly enough to translate all those intercepted communications? Self-defense for all Americans requires the goodwill of its Arab and Central-Asian citizens and residents.

Some limited self-defense measures do not have such self-cancelling tradeoffs. Passageways between airplane cockpits and passenger cabins can be eliminated, over time. This is an inconvenience for potential hijackers, who would then have to learn how to take off as well as how to steer, or would have to hijack planes from Canada or Mexico, or would have to stick to cropdusters or cargo planes or Ryder trucks, or would have to remain undercover longer in order to get employed as commercial pilots. Stricter use of metal detectors at airports—though initial breaches are discouraging—could also be an inconvenience to potential hijackers, devaluing their heavy investment in box cutters and forcing them to use, say, ceramic knives. Fancy new face-scanning technology could be an inconvenience to potential perpetrators as long as they don’t diverge from their mug shots too much via age or plastic surgery. But—GET REAL!—nobody believes any fairy stories about such security fixes being reliable.

Another concern is that "next time" a hijacker might point his plane at a nuclear power plant, such as the plants south of Detroit, a short hop from Canada. It would not take a large commercial aircraft to cause a massive flood of radioactive poison. If we were to GET REAL about self-defense, we would quickly phase out the use of these plants. No terrorist dreams of crashing a plane into a field of windmills. And this would also make us safer in other ways unrelated to terrorism.

Noam Chomsky registers this Star Wars Warning: "The events reveal, dramatically, the foolishness of the project of ‘missile defense’. As has been obvious all along, and pointed out repeatedly by strategic analysts, if anyone wants to cause immense damage in the US, including weapons of mass destruction, they are highly unlikely to launch a missile attack, thus guaranteeing their immediate destruction. There are innumerable easier ways that are basically unstoppable. But [the current] events will, very likely, be exploited to increase the pressure to develop these systems and put them into place. "Defense" is a thin cover for plans for militarization of space, and with good PR, even the flimsiest arguments will carry some weight among a frightened public."

But virtually all the people who would criticize the "timing" of these dissenting actions would be critical anyway. Notice: when people who are most eager for war criticize Bush for not moving fast enough, they aren’t considered "unpatriotic". And meanwhile, the government and the business lobbyists are moving full steam ahead, almost completely unchecked. Alaska’s Senator Murkowski urges that this national emergency requires us to use up the oil in the National Wildlife Refuge—but we’d be a lot more secure and healthy, and for a much longer time, if we invested in renewable energy sources. Business lobbyists bray that more tax cuts for the rich, or shutting down debate on trade agreements via fast track, are needed to "spur the economy" for the "war effort"—despite the fact that the manufacturing base that would be mobilized for war has mostly already moved overseas. So watchdog groups need to STAY REAL in the name of defending the public.

Nationally syndicated investigative reporter (and UM grad) Martin Lee imagines asking Bush this question: "Terrorists finance their operations by laundering money through offshore banks and other hot money outlets. Yet your administration has undermined international efforts to crack down on tax havens … [by mandating] greater transparency in tax and banking practices. In the wake of the September 11 massacre, will you reassess this decision … even if it means displeasing wealthy Americans and campaign contributors who avoid paying taxes by hiding money in offshore accounts?"

Finally for now, the security failures of the airlines also show that we can’t rely on profit-driven companies for self-defense. And don’t think that they’ve learned their lesson and will do better next time, to protect their stock price … the taxpayer-funded "bailout" of the airlines rewards them for endangering us.

For your own self-defense, don’t trust the boss. At a minimum, for your own good, when the building next door has been hit by a plane, and the boss tells you to get back to work, please, don’t listen. GET LOST!

The Strengthening Principle warns against security tradeoffs globally as well as locally. The CIA and FBI routinely claim credit for squelching terrorist threats, but they seem to do this mainly through periodic mass closing of embassies around the globe. Where are all the arrested perpetrators (arrested before the deed, that is, and tried for attempted murder)? Potentially, increasing the power of the CIA could block some threats, but the CIA has a long history of substituting big threats for little or merely imaginary threats. To take just the most relevant of dozens of examples, one day there’s an attempt to lure the Soviet Union into a "trap" in Afghanistan, so we can put them through their own "Vietnam" (in the words of Carter’s "National Security" Advisor), and the next day the CIA is giving arms and training to bin Laden and company.

The CIA also has a long history of missing the biggest threats, worldwide. To take only one example relevant to this case, the Observer (UK) newspaper reports that for the last six years Sudan has repeatedly offered the US thick files on al Qaida, offers which were simply ignored. A "senior CIA source" told the paper "had we had this data we may have had a better chance of preventing the attacks." When Clinton pressured Sudan to expel bin Laden in 1996, "Sudanese intelligence believed this to be a great mistake. ‘There we could keep track of him, read his mail. Once we kicked him out and he went underground in Afghanistan, he couldn’t be tracked anywhere." The only intelligence service with even minimal ground-level information about Afghanistan is the Pakistani ISI, but it is rife with Taliban sympathizers, and is as likely to foil as to help the CIA.

Throwing money at the problem is very unlikely to help. In "The Counterterrorism Myth" written by nine-year CIA Middle East operative Reuel Marc Gerecht, the situation is summed up this way: "The CIA probably doesn’t have a single truly qualified Arabic-speaking officer of Middle Eastern background who can play a believable Muslim fundamentalist who would volunteer to spend years of his life with shitty food and no women in the mountains of Afghanistan. For Christ’s sake, most case officers live in the suburbs of Virginia. We don’t do that kind of thing. … Operations that include diarrhea as a way of life don’t happen."

Finally let’s consider the third self-defense principle, Weakening, which counsels you to find ways to keep potential perpetrators from even trying to harm you. There are basically two ways to try this.

One way to try weakening a threat is to find out what the perpetrators want, and give it to them in hopes that they will cease trying to harm you. When doing what the perpetrators want is something likely to weaken you, or likely not to weaken the threat, it is called "appeasement" and is simply inconsistent with the Weakening Principle. But with some threats you get lucky. Sometimes there’s a "win-win" situation—what the perpetrators want is a strategically good idea for you, anyway. Then so long as you have good reason to believe the perpetrators are sincere about what they want, going for a win-win is not "appeasement" or "capitulation" or anything unmacho like that.

The alternative is to use brute force, trying to kill or capture or otherwise incapacitate any potential perpetrators before they have a chance to try anything. There are many important moral and legal objections to using brute force, but I’ve promised, nudge-nudge, to say no more about that kind of thing here. Unless the brute force activity is likely to weaken you, or strengthen the threat, it’s ok as far as self-defense alone is concerned. But we do have to think about whether brute force is likely to have these unwanted side-effects. And to do that, it is smart to try to figure out what makes potential perpetrators tick.

So in either case, the basic thing the Weakening Principle says you need to do is to find out the real motives of potential perpetrators, if possible. And of course if you’re serious about self-defense this means not guessing but observing: paying careful attention to the demands they actually articulate, and checking to see whether what they say is in keeping with what they actually do.

In the case of the hijackers, you’re likely to be familiar with the convenient diagnosis offered by most leaders and TV pundits: that the hijackers acted out of hatred for freedom, democracy, and prosperity. GET REAL! This is a complete fairy story, that fits with neither what the hijackers do nor with what they earnestly say. First, several countries equal or exceed America’s degrees of freedom, democracy, and (per capita) properity: e.g., Canada, Holland, Sweden, Denmark, etc. But they are not being attacked. Second, these same hijackers seem to have relentlessly and fervently fought the Soviet Union, which was hardly a shining beacon of freedom, democracy, or (average) prosperity. The real motive of the hijackers has got to be based on something the US shares with the Soviet Union and doesn’t share with Canada. And everyone knows what that feature is, even George W and even Bill O’Reilly.

But just to avoid any guessing games, let’s hear what Osama bin Laden himself has to say about his motives. Look at Sections 1-4 of bin Laden’s words on the next page. I’ll wait here. … … Back? Good. According to bin Laden (and backed up by much independent evidence), the Soviet Union was violently persecuting and killing Muslims, so they fought back. Holland tends not to do very much of that, so they haven’t fought Holland. And according to bin Laden (and backed up by much independent evidence), the US has been persecuting and killing Muslims on a grander scale for a longer time. So they fight back.

It’s true that the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan do hate what we (but not they) call freedom, democracy, and prosperity. But notice: the Taliban are not among the hijackers, and the hijackers are not part of the Taliban. The Taliban can barely control their own country, and are nowhere near trying to export their system to Michigan or even to their own neighboring countries. Even if bin Laden shares the Taliban’s harshest views—though no westerner who has encountered him concludes this—notice again: bin Laden is not among the hijackers. What matters is not what someone like bin Laden or the Taliban themselves think, but what the actual hijackers think. And whatever bin Laden’s deepest motives may be, there is no doubt that the words of his you have just read are the overwhelming means by which potential perpetrators become recruited to fight against the superpowers. Video and audio recordings of bin Laden’s words circle the globe, together with images of torn Palestinian and Iraqi children, and images of revenge against the US.

Instinctively, we know this. The closer you get to New York’s "ground zero", the less you hear people clamoring for war. And not because New Yorkers are known for being laid back, either. This is the home of the ticker-tape parade celebrating war. But when the "ticker tape" falling from the skyscrapers is flaming office paper mixed with body parts, the thought of war is sickening, and sick.

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If there is an alternative to brute force, it can only be found in addressing the grievances of the perpetrators. If this is mere appeasement, it could not be recommended on self-defense grounds (though maybe it could be defended on moral or legal grounds). But in fact we’re lucky to be in a win-win situation here; the aims of the perpetrators largely dovetail with what we should be doing anyway, in the interest of law, morality, and self-defense. Here, of course, I will limit myself to the self-defense considerations.

Bin Laden’s overriding concern seems to be removing US troops from Saudia Arabia. That shouldn’t be hard for us to do … they weren’t even there until the 1991 build-up after George Bush the First decided to go to war with Iraq, rather than accept a peaceful Iraqi withdrawal from illegally occupied Kuwait "linked" with a peaceful Israeli withdrawal from illegally occupied Palestine and Lebanon. The US government had long wanted an excuse to station troops near the Saudi oil riches, overcoming the objections of the Islamic government and population, and there is evidence that for this end the US duped its longstanding partner-in-crime Saddam Hussein into thinking it would be ok for him to invade Kuwait.

The most obvious win-win situation is ending the sanctions on the Iraqi people. These sanctions have not done a thing to weaken Saddam Hussein’s grip on power in Iraq. They have only strengthened him by literally decimating—killing and otherwise incapacitating at least one tenth of—the population. Even the Iraqi opposition opposes the sanctions. Even Kuwait opposes the sanctions. And the sanctions are the precise reason that there are no longer UN weapons inspectors in Iraq. End the sanctions, and inspectors could return the next day. Even if you didn’t care one bit for the Iraqi children who die—each month a World Trade Center’s "worth" of corpses pile up—you would have strategic reasons to lift the sanctions.

The only reason they are in place is so that the US policy makers don’t have to admit to what the whole world knows has been a collosally stupid and pointless and evil policy. In their embarassment they sometimes try to say that the deaths are all Hussein’s fault—and no fault at all of the US—because Hussein doesn’t do what we say. But this is as crazy and vile as saying the NY/DC/PA deaths are all Bush’s fault—and no fault at all of the hijackers—because Bush doesn’t do what the hijackers say. The embarassment of our employees in the US foreign policy establishment is no reason to allow them to continue with starving and denying medicines to children in a policy that only wrecks our security. Ending the sanctions is the mother of all win-win situations.

Since the "demands" of potential perpetrators are things we should be and need to be doing anyway, none of this counts as "appeasement". It makes us stronger, not weaker. It would "drain the sea" of the motivations for terrorism. The only remaining potential "appeasement" worry is almost too bizarre to even mention. Maybe, it might be dreamed, stopping the systematic US murder of Muslim innocents would only addict the perpetrators to their methods, making them issue new demands without end. But this is another pure fairy story. These are among the most earnest people in the world, obviously. And unless their whole religion is some sort of self-conscious ruse, it functions as a brake. Not even the most extreme fundamentalist Muslim believes that Allah will reward him in heaven for martyrdom without a cause, or with an arbitrary cause.

Also, in part 6 of his words on the previous page, bin Laden explicitly marks Western (non-American) improvements in the treatment of Muslims. And he takes special care to describe to sympathize with Americans deceived by government and media, and hopes for the day when they can elect a government that defends their interests. He’s right about this. Stop voting for national-level Democrats and Republicans, in your own self-defense. Think about whether the trade towers would still be standing and all those families would still be intact, if (to take the most successful of many worthy third-party candidates) Ralph Nader had been elected and started a process of healing between the American people to whome he has devoted his life, and the Middle Eastern people of his ancestry.

Contact Agenda (editor@agenda2.org, 734-657-6728) to find out about ongoing antiwar and antiscapegoating, pro-peace and pro-justice actions you can participate in. Fly the Earth Flag on the back cover, alongside or instead of your American flag.