While most media outlets are dedicating their programming today to re-broadcasting their coverage of 9/11 and commemorating the United States' victims of September 11, Media Mouse would like to remind people that the “war on terror” has been a complete failure in any respect other than providing a weak ideological pretext for the continued expansion United States’ hegemony and the military-industrial complex in the absence of the Cold War. The “war on terror” has failed to lessen terrorism in the world despite the invasion and occupation of both Afghanistan and Iraq in which thousands of civilians have been killed in two colossal acts of state terrorism perpetrated by the United States. In November of 2001, scholar Noam Chomsky described the United States as “a leading terrorist state” and outlined several historical instances of state terrorism perpetrated by the United States:

The U.S. is the only country that was condemned for international terrorism by the World Court and that rejected a Security Council resolution calling on states to observe international law. It continues international terrorism. That example’s the least of it. And there are also what are in comparison, minor examples. Everybody here was quite properly outraged by the Oklahoma City bombing, and for a couple of days, the headlines all read, Oklahoma City looks like Beirut. I didn’t see anybody point out that Beirut also looks like Beirut, and part of the reason is that the Reagan Administration had set off a terrorist bombing there in 1985 that was very much like Oklahoma City, a truck bombing outside a mosque timed to kill the maximum number of people as they left. It killed eighty and wounded two hundred, aimed at a Muslim cleric whom they didn’t like and whom they missed. It was not very secret. I don’t know what name you give to the attack that’s killed maybe a million civilians in Iraq and maybe a half a million children, which is the price the Secretary of State says we’re willing to pay. Is there a name for that? Supporting Israeli atrocities is another one. Supporting Turkey’s crushing of its own Kurdish population, for which the Clinton Administration gave the decisive support, 80 percent of the arms, escalating as atrocities increased, is another. Or take the bombing of the Sudan, one little footnote, so small that it is casually mentioned in passing in reports on the background to the Sept. 11 crimes. How would the same commentators react if the bin Laden network blew up half the pharmaceutical supplies in the U.S. and the facilities for replenishing them? Or Israel? Or any country where people “matter”? Although that’s not a fair analogy, because the U.S. target is a poor country which had few enough drugs and vaccines to begin with and can’t replenish them. Nobody knows how many thousands or tens of thousands of deaths resulted from that single atrocity, and bringing up that death toll is considered scandalous. If somebody did that to the U.S. or its allies, can you imagine the reaction? In this case we say, Oh, well, too bad, minor mistake, let’s go on to the next topic. Other people in the world don’t react like that. When bin Laden brings up that bombing, he strikes a resonant chord, even with people who despise and fear him, and the same, unfortunately, is true of much of the rest of his rhetoric.

Or to return to “our own little region over here,” as Henry Stimson called it, take Cuba. After many years of terror beginning in late 1959, including very serious atrocities, Cuba should have the right to resort to violence against the U.S. according to U.S. doctrine that is scarcely questioned. It is, unfortunately, all too easy to continue, not only with regard to the U.S. but also other terrorist states.

It is from this context that shortly after the September 11 terrorist attacks, members of Media Mouse began actively participating in the emergent antiwar movement and have continued our involvement to this day. In a statement published online in November of 2001, Media Mouse articulated a number of concerns regarding the United States’ response to 9/11 and the media’s coverage of the United States’ policy decisions and urged people to “question the military response to terrorism” by educating themselves through independent media and acting to challenge the “war on terror.” While our words were unduly toned down in response to the stifling atmosphere of timidity that engulfed much of the left in the months after 9/11, many of our core concerns remain—that the United States military actions will primarily harm civilians and will be a catalyst for further acts of terrorism, that the United States has failed to acknowledge its past role in acts of international terrorism by trying war criminals such as former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, that the security response to 9/11 has brought further repression and surveillance onto United States citizens of which people of color, particularly Arabs, will be the most immediately affected, and that the corporate media has functioned in a manner that reinforces official government positions and downplays dissent. As such, we would like to renew our call for people to resist US imperialism and to organize for a new world.

Donald Rumsfeld said that his mission in the War Against Terror was to persuade the world that Americans must be allowed to continue their way of life. When the maddened King stamps his foot, slaves tremble in their quarters. So, standing here today, it's hard for me to say this, but 'The American Way of Life' is simply not sustainable. Because it doesn't acknowledge that there is a world beyond America.

Fortunately, power has a shelf-life. When the time comes, maybe this mighty empire will, like others before it, overreach itself and implode from within. It looks as though structural cracks have already appeared. As the War Against Terror casts its net wider and wider, America's corporate heart is haemorrhaging. For all the endless empty chatter about democracy, today the world is run by three of the most secretive institutions in the world: the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organisation, all three of which, in turn, are dominated by the U.S. Their decisions are made in secret. The people who head them are appointed behind closed doors. Nobody really knows anything about them, their politics, their beliefs, their intentions. Nobody elected them. Nobody said they could make decisions on our behalf. A world run by a handful of greedy bankers and CEOs who nobody elected can't possibly last.

Soviet-style communism failed, not because it was intrinsically evil but because it was flawed. It allowed too few people to usurp too much power. Twenty-first century market-capitalism, American-style, will fail for the same reasons. Both are edifices constructed by human intelligence, undone by human nature.

The time has come, the Walrus said. Perhaps things will get worse and then better. Perhaps there's a small god up in heaven readying herself for us. Another world is not only possible, she's on her way. Maybe many of us won't be here to greet her, but on a quiet day, if I listen very carefully, I can hear her breathing.

- Arundhati Roy, “Come September”