Terrorism and Tyranny: Trampling Freedom, Justice, and Peace to Rid the World of Evil [Hardcover]

The USA was attacked not because it is free, as Bush monotonously claims, but because the US state attacks and intervenes abroad, particularly because it backs dictatorships in the Middle East, has bases in Saudi Arabia, and supports Israel's occupation of Palestine.

Chapter 3, 'Blundering to 9/11', details the US state's failure to protect Americans from terrorism. Before Sheik Abdul Rahman's group bombed the World Trade Centre in 1993, the FBI sacked its informer, the Sheik's bodyguard, because they thought that he was lying when he warned that the group was planning a bombing in New York. Subsequently, all the federal agencies failed to take seriously the risk of more such attacks.

After Clinton ordered the bombings in Sudan and Afghanistan in 1998, warnings poured in that Al Qa'ida would hit back by crashing planes into the World Trade Centre, the Pentagon, CIA HQ and the White House. On 6 August 2001, the CIA briefed Bush that bin Laden was determined to strike in the USA and might hijack planes to do so. Bush still refuses to release the briefing, and later released just ten pages of the Congress Joint Intelligence Committee's 450-page report on his foreknowledge and failures before 9/11.

Congressmen passed the Patriot Act in October 2001 before they had seen it (just like MPs with the Maastricht Treaty). The Act allowed unprecedented numbers of secret detentions, attacks on privacy and searches of homes (18,000 search warrants have been issued since 9/11). The state gave itself unchecked powers of surveillance of bank accounts, e-mails, medical records, phone calls, letters, lawyer-client discussions, and Internet, library and bookshop use.

All these new powers have made Americans no safer: in September 2002, two New York Daily News reporters carried box-cutters, knives and razors through eleven major airports onto 14 flights on six airlines - nobody spotted any of these banned items.

The book is full of accounts of abuses of power by the US state - attacks on the presumption of innocence, the right to a fair trial, the freedoms of expression and assembly, and the freedom from torture. The Patriot Act created a new crime of 'domestic terrorism', defined as actions 'to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion'. The new Homeland Security Department told police to keep an eye on anyone who 'expressed dislike of attitudes and decisions of the US government'. Governments around the world applaud and copy these abuses.

Bush claims terrorism is the main threat to Americans, but just one police department, Prince George's County in Maryland, killed more Americans in the 1990s - 59 (47 shot dead plus 12 killed in police custody) - than any terrorist organisation. In the 1990s, police in the USA's 50 largest county and police departments killed more than 2,100 people.

Between 1991 and 2002, international terrorists killed 8,924 people worldwide; but the US-British sanctions on Iraq alone killed more than 500,000 children. The US and British governments stopped Iraq from importing $5 billions' worth of humanitarian goods, including soap, ambulances, antibiotics and medical, water treatment and sanitation equipment. Blair took no responsibility for the deaths, blamed them all on Saddam, and then used them to justify attacking the country: he said that they died "because of the nature of the regime under which they are [sic] living. Now, that is why we're acting."

After 9/11, Bush first attacked Afghanistan, not terrorism, killing 5,000 civilians by bombing, rather than fighting and killing the terrorists on the ground. Consequently the leaders escaped; the USA won a battle, but not the war. Afghanistan has been abandoned: it has not been rebuilt and has not become a democracy. It has again become the world's largest heroin producer, although suppressing its heroin production was supposedly a top US priority. In 2002, President Karzai said poppy growing would stay banned: Afghan production rose by 2000% that year.

Secondly, Bush backed Israel's war against the Palestinian people (witness his $9 billion aid package to Israel in early 2003). An Israeli government minister quoted Numbers chapter 33 to justify expelling all Arabs from the Occupied Territories: God commanded the Israelites, "Ye shall drive out all the inhabitants of the land from before you". But the more violence the Israeli government has used, the more violence its civilians have suffered. More Israelis have been killed since Sharon became Prime Minister than in the 1967 War. And occupation corrupts: Rabbi Yaacov Perrin said, "One million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail." Israeli soldiers are under orders never to shoot at Israeli settlers, even those killing unarmed Arabs: the IDF commander in Hebron disclosed, "the instructions are not to shoot at Jews because Jews are not the enemy."

Third, Bush attacked Iraq, all the while saying, 'if war is forced upon us ... ' He claimed that Iraqi WMD threatened the USA, but as General Kamel said in 1995, "All weapons - biological, chemical, missile, nuclear - were destroyed." Bovard sums up Bush's policy as 'defrauding the nation to war'.

We need to defeat Al Qa'ida, but Bush and Blair's wars of aggression are strengthening the forces of terrorism, not weakening them.