The Chattanooga Shootings: Can Attacking Military
Sites of a Nation at War be “Terrorism”?
By Glenn Greenwald
July 19, 2015 "Information
Clearing House"
-
"The
Intercept"
- 07/17/15 -
A 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.
UPDATE: A tweet
from CNN
today:
If any enemy of the West ever made a similar
claim, it would be denounced as an oxymoron.