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Bill Keller’s Exit (Part I)

October 14, 2011   ·   0 Comments

Source: NYTX

By Howard Friel:

The day after the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington on 9/11, and after spending 17 years as a reporter and editor at the New York Times, Bill Keller wrote his inauguaral opinion piece as a columnist for the paper. Keller began: “An Israeli response to America’s aptly dated wake-up call might well be, ‘Now you know.’ ” In his second use of the Israel analogy, and while referring to Ramzi Yousef, who was convicted of bombing the north tower of the World Trade Center in 1993, Keller wrote: “Like Israel, maybe now we will begin to take these men more seriously.” Keller also wrote, in the same column: “Like Israelis, we will―at least until our memories fade again―calculate our vulnerability when we book a vacation or send our children off to school”; “Like Israelis, we will have some explaining to do to our children about the world we live in, and our ability to leach the hatred from the lessons will be strained”; and, “If we are smart, like Israel we may now start thinking more clearly about the stateless enemy as a threat to our national security.” The point was, according to Keller, that the attack on New York and Washington “moves us into the very exclusive club of democracies for which terrorism is not peripheral, remote or episodic, but a horrible routine.”

Of course, Keller could have put forward a different analogy to Israel. As the Haaretz journalist, Amira Hass, once put it, “history did not begin with the Qassam rockets, but for us, the Israelis, history always begins when the Palestinians hurt us, and then the pain is completely decontextualized.”⁽¹⁾ Thus, Keller could have written, “Like Israel’s history, U.S. history does not begin with the terrorist attacks against our cities and citizens, as horrible as the attacks on 9/11 were.” While no history justifies attacks on civilians, we can learn from history and, perhaps, with that knowledge, prevent terrorist attacks against us in the future.

The immediate historical context in which Keller wrote his column on September 12, 2001, if examined, would lead to a very different set of conclusions than the ones reached by Keller. For example, between September 29, 2000 (which marks the start of the second Palestinian uprising against the Israeli occupation) and Keller’s column on 9/12, the vast majority of the killing was done by Israel, and the vast majority of the dying was done by Palestinians—a fact which may have played a role in the motivation of the terrorists who attacked New York and Washington.

On October 2, 2000, Amnesty International issued a press release, which “condemned indiscriminate killings of civilians following four days of clashes in Israel and the Occupied Territories which have left at least 35 Palestinian civilians dead and hundreds of others injured.” The party that had engaged in the “indiscriminate killings” was Israel, then and earlier, as Amnesty reported: “We have been saying for years that Israel is killing civilians unlawfully by firing at them during demonstrations and riots.”⁽²⁾

On October 9, Amnesty issued another press release: “Since 29 September [2000], Israeli security forces have frequently used excessive force on demonstrators when lives were not in immediate danger…. More than 80 people, including children, nearly all of them Palestinians from the Occupied Territories and Israel, have died since clashes began on 29 September 2000 between Israeli security forces and Palestinian demonstrators.”⁽³⁾ In a report also issued in October 2000, Human Rights Watch observed that it had “found a pattern of repeated Israeli use of excessive lethal force during clashes between its security forces and Palestinian demonstrators in situations where demonstrators were unarmed and posed no threat of death or serious injury to the security forces or to others.”⁽⁴⁾ And on December 31, 2000, Defense for Children International published a detailed list of the names of Palestinian children “who were killed as a direct result of Israeli military and settler presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territories” in September 29–December 31, 2000.⁽⁵⁾ The list is reproduced below in its entirety:

This compilation of fatalities is corroborated by other human rights organizations. In a report that was issued in March 2001, and citing figures from the Palestinian Ministry of Health, Giorgio Giacomelli, the U.N.’s Special Rapporteur to the United Nations Human Rights Commission, wrote: “From 29 September to end of February 2001, Israeli settlers and soldiers killed approximately 145 Palestinian children under 18, of whom at least 59 were under 15 years of age. An overwhelming 72 percent of child deaths have resulted from gunshot wounds in the upper body (head and chest), which may indicate a ‘shoot-to-kill’ policy.”⁽⁶⁾ Also in March 2001, the United Nations Human Rights Commission, in a report authored by John Dugard of South Africa, Richard Falk of the United States, and Kamal Hossain of Bangladesh, and following a visit to the occupied Palestinian territories and Israel on February 10–18, 2001, while citing “conservative estimates,” reported that as of February 21, 2001, “84 Palestinian children under the age of 17 years have been killed and some 5,000 injured; 1 Israeli child has been killed and 15 injured.” Overall, the authors of the report found that, since the beginning of the Palestinian intifada [uprising] on September 29, 2000, “311 Palestinians (civilians and security forces) have been killed by Israeli security forces and civilians in the OPT [Occupied Palestinian Territories],” while “47 Israelis (civilians and security forces) have been killed by Palestinian civilians and security forces,” and that “11,575 Palestinians and 466 Israelis have been injured.”⁽⁷⁾

One could continue to quote from such reports, with similar results, including those issued a year or more after the start of the Palestinian uprising. On September 28, 2001, shortly after Keller wrote his September 2001 op-ed piece for the Times, Amnesty International reported that “more than 570 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli security services, the vast majority unlawfully when the lives of others were not in danger,” and that “more than 150 Israelis have been killed” by Palestinians since the start of the Palestinian uprising a year earlier. Amnesty also reported that, within the same period, “more than 150 Palestinian children and 30 Israeli children have been killed,” and “those maimed and wounded”—the vast majority Palestinians—“number more than 15,000.”⁽⁸⁾

While citing an Israeli analogy in the immediate wake of 9/11, Keller recognized only the history of Israeli victims of terrorism, and ignored the history of Israeli killings of Palestinians. This is in additon to totally ignoring the brutal history of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories, which features the ongoing annexation of Palestinian land, the extraction of Palestinian resources, the overall colonial nature of the occupation, and the aparthied-like system of separation and subjugation based on race. Without a society-wide knowledge of the history of the killing of Palestinians by Israelis―due to people in high positions who don’t report it–there is little resonance to reports like the one issued by Agence France Presse in 2009 that “U.S. support for Israel led to 9/11.”⁽⁹⁾ The alternative explanation is that the terrorism targeted at the United States and Israel is simply terrorism for terrorism’s sake by a mad race of Arab Muslims, and that a 45-year U.S.-backed military occupation and brutal killings of Palestinian children play no role in the terrorism targeted at the United States or Israel.

As Keller’s tenure as the Times’ executive editor (July 2003 to September 2011) was ending last month, he wrote a mea culpa of sorts in the Times’ magazine to take back his support for a post–9/11 invasion of Iraq. The idea apparently was to shed his badge as a pro-invasion “liberal hawk” on Iraq, which he forged himself in his opinion pieces in the Times from 2001 to 2003. So it was that in September of this year, Keller wrote, “My Unfinished 9/11 Business: A Hard Look at Why I Wanted War,” which was meant to distance the post–executive editor edition of Bill Keller from the pre–executive editor edition. But Keller’s cluelessness is a constant, beginning within hours of the towers falling down, and continuing into his second coming as an opinion-page columnist at the Times.

In this “hard look,” and about that terrible day ten years ago, Keller wrote that “it may be difficult to recall with our attention now turned inward upon a faltering economy, but the suddenly apparent menace of the world awakened a bellicose surge of mission and made hawks of many―including me―who had a lifelong wariness of the warrior reflex.” Although some of us also had very young children at home, it never occurred to me at the time (or since) that the justifications for invading Iraq—which had no military capability to invade the United States, and which had nothing to do with 9/11—would include the new casus belli principle that Keller lays out: “I remember a mounting protective instinct, heightened by the birth of my second daughter almost exactly nine months after the attacks. Something dreadful was loose in the world, and the urge to stop it, to do something―to prove something―was overriding a career-long schooling in the virtues of caution and skepticism.” Thus, “something” was on the loose, we needed to do “something,” to prove “something”; hence, invade a country that had nothing to do with 9/11.

Although we are only into the beginning of Keller’s September 2011 piece at this point, it is already apparent that the level of analysis here, ten years after 9/11, will be no better than it was when it actually counted on 9/12. Keller still writes today as if the pro-invasion commentators with whom he aligned himself, and with whom he invented the “liberal hawks club” to convince newspaper readers and TV watchers that it somehow made sense to invade Iraq, were somehow worth listening to: “During the months of public argument about how to deal with Saddam Hussein, I christened an imaginary association of pundits the I-Can’t-Believe-I’m-a-Hawk Club, made up of liberals for whom 9/11 had stirred a fresh willingness to employ American might. It was a large and estimable group of writers and affiliations, including, among others, Thomas Friedman of The Times; Fareed Zakaria, of Newsweek; George Packer and Jeffrey Goldberg of The New Yorker; Richard Cohen of The Washington Post; the blogger Andrew Sullivan; Paul Berman of Dissent; Christopher Hitchens of just about everywhere; and Kenneth Pollack, the former C.I.A. analyst whose book, ‘The Threatening Storm,’ became the liberal manual on the Iraqi threat.” In our 2004 book, The Record of the Paper, about the New York Times, Richard Falk and I wrote at length about Keller’s pro-invasion opinion pieces, and about many of the “liberal hawks” mentioned above by Keller. A few excerpts will suffice to show the intellectual discernment that Keller applied to his decision to support an invasion of Iraq.

In December 2002, three months before the start of the invasion, and in the New Yorker, George Packer criticized the massive anti-invasion street protests in the United States: “But this [anti-war] movement has a serious liability, one that will just about guarantee its impotence: it’s controlled by the furthest reaches of the American left. Speakers at the demonstrations voice unnuanced slogans like ‘No Sanctions, No Bombing’ and ‘No Blood for Oil.’ As for what should be done to keep this mass murderer [Saddam Hussein] and his weapons in check, they have nothing to say at all. This is not a constructive liberal anti-war movement.” In our book, Falk and I responded:

Some questions for Packer are indicated: When Packer’s article was published, economic sanctions had been in place against Iraq for over a devade with devastating consequences to the Iraqi population, especially young children. Where is the extremism in the “No Sanctions” slogan? It was well established that a US invasion of Iraq would feature an air-war campaign against ground targets in Iraq, which inevitably would cause thousands of Iraqi casualties, which is precisely what happened. Where is the extremism in the “No Bombing” slogan?

And so on. (See The Record of the Paper, pp. 67–69.) Meanwhile, Packer profiled the views of a handful of “liberal hawks” as the “ideas” men of the liberal intelligensia. Thus, for Packer, the opponents of an Iraq invasion were unnunaced leftists with no ideas, while the pro-invasion liberal hawks were filled with such good “ideas,” according to Packer, that they should have been advising President George W. Bush about how to sell the invasion to the American public: “Oddly enough, President Bush needs them [the liberal hawks], too. The one level on which [Bush] hasn’t even tried to make a case [for invading Iraq] is the level of ideas. These liberal hawks could give a voice to his war aims, which he has largely kept to himself. They could make the case for war to suspicious Europeans and to wavering fellow Americans. They might even be able to explain the connection between Iraq and the war on terrorism.” (The Record of the Paper, pp. 67–70.)

The liberal hawk with whom Keller was most infatuated was Kenneth Pollack, author of the 2002 book, The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq. About Pollack and his book, Keller wrote in the Times in February 2003: “Kenneth Pollack, the Clinton National Security Council expert whose argument for invading Iraq is surely the most influential book of this season, has provided intellectual cover for every liberal who finds himself inclining toward war but uneasy about Mr. Bush.”⁽¹⁰⁾ Keller’s views aside, Pollack’s The Threatening Storm was perhaps the most dreadful book arguing for an invasion of Iraq in a tall stack of close competitors. In a recent summary of the books published after 9/11, the Independent’s Robert Fisk wrote derisively that the “most prominent” one was “ex-CIA spook Kenneth Pollack’s The Threatening Storm—and didn’t we all remember Churchill’s The Gathering Storm?—which, needless to say, compared the forthcoming battle against Saddam with the crisis faced by Britain and France in 1938.”⁽¹¹⁾

In the three lengthy op-ed pieces by Pollack that the Times’ printed in the months before the Iraq invasion, Pollack indeed argued as if Iraq’s (nonexistent) nuclear weapons program threatened the survival of the United States. See Pollack’s “Why Iraq Can’t Be Deterred” (NYT, September 26, 2002); “How Bush Can Avoid the Inspections Trap” (NYT, January 27, 2003); and, “A Last Chance to Stop Iraq” (NYT, February 21, 2003). In these unusually lengthy op-ed pieces, Pollack argued that Iraq possessed a nuclear weapons program, and “there is every reason to believe that the question is not one of war or no war, but rather war now or war later—a war without nuclear weapons or a war with them” (September 26, 2002). Pollack also wrote that “now the United States is firmly stuck in the ‘inspections trap,’ and our French and German allies appear determined to keep us there … along with their fellow travelers in Moscow and Beijing, [who] are likely to seize on Mr. [Hans] Blix’s report to insist on delaying any military operation to enforce Iraq’s disarmament” (January 27, 2003). And, “Yes, we must weigh the costs of a war with Iraq today, but on the other side of the balance we must place the cost of a war with a nuclear-armed Iraq tomorrow” (February 21, 2003).

When Iraqi nuclear weapons and the nuclear weapons program weren’t located shortly after the invasion, Pollack wrote a 1900-word op-ed piece for the Times titled, “Saddam’s Bombs: We’ll Find Them,” in which he wrote: “Accusations are mounting that the Bush administration made up the whole Iraqi weapons threat to justify an invasion. That is just not the case—America and its allies had plenty of evidence before the war, and before President Bush took office, indicating that Iraq was retaining its illegal weapons program,” and “the fact that the [nuclear weapons] sites we suspected of contaning hidden weapons before the war turned out to have nothing in them is not very significant.”⁽¹²⁾ While it is generally difficult to argue that something exists when there is no evidence to prove its existence, this was Pollack’s claim in the immediate wake of the invasion.

On the other hand, Pollack systematically ignored evidence that the International Atomic Energy Agency had destroyed Iraq’s nuclear weapons program after the 1991 Gulf War; in his 500-page book, The Threatening Storm, Pollack ignored the IAEA’s published record of nuclear-disarmament in Iraq. Pollack also ignored the March 1999 report of the Amorim Panel—a special panel appointed by the U.N. Security Council in 1998 to assess the status of Iraqi WMD—which concluded that “the bulk of Iraq’s proscribed weapons programme has been eliminated.” (See The Record of the Paper, pp. 24–28.) Perhaps someday Keller will quote the passages from Pollack’s book—beyond the narrow margins of a 700-word op-ed piece—that so emphatically persuaded him to support an invasion of Iraq.

Despite Keller’s “hard look” inward, there is no evidence that he wouldn’t vote the same way for war today that he did from 2001 to 2003. Incredibly, in “My Unfinished 9/11 Business: A Hard Look at Why I Wanted War,” Keller never re-examined his vote for war in the context of the legality of an invasion under the U.N. Charter and the U.S. Constitution; whether the invasion undertaken without the requirement of an authorizing Security Council resolution, and without the necessity of self-defense in response to an “armed attack” as defined by international law, constituted a war of aggression, and thus a crime against peace, and thereby the “supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” Keller, in fact, evinces complete ignorance of such law, which implicates the cardinal rule of the U.N. Charter (the prohibition against the threat and use of force) and the major legal lesson under the Nuremberg precedent of the Nazi aggression. Keller thus writes: “In several columns I laid out justifications for overthrowing Saddam Hussein. There were caveats―most significantly, that there was no reason to rush, that we should hold off to see whether Iraq’s behavior could be sufficiently contained by sanctions and inspections. Like many liberal hawks, I was ambivalent; Pollack said he was 55 to 45 for war, which feels about right.

But when the troops went in, they went with my blessing.” Under the U.N. Charter, “that there was no reason to rush” meant that there was no legal right to attack Iraq with an air and land invasion. While Keller cites Samantha Power’s “criterion for military invasion,” he never cites the criterion for invading a country under the U.N. Charter. And Power’s criterion—“an immediate threat of large-scale loss of life”—isn’t the U.N. Charter’s criterion.

In his retraction of support for the Iraq invasion, Keller ultimately posed the key question as follows: “Knowing what we know now, with the glorious advantage of hindsight, was it a mistake to invade and occupy Iraq?” The issues of “hindsight” and “mistakes” are grossly inappropriate ones to consider in retrospect. The threat to invade was illegal at the time of the threats back in 2001, 2002, and 2003. And the invasion itself was always illegal without a self-defense necessity.

A key lesson to be learned is that when political leaders and editors decide that they want to live in a nation that respects human rights and the rule of law, and thus end their support for illegal invasions and the Israeli occupation of Palestine, the threat of terrorism against the United States will recede. It doesn’t appear that Keller has learned that lesson.

Next: Bill Keller on Wikileaks and Julian Asaange

1. “History Did Not Begin with the Qassams,” Ha’aretz, January 14, 2009. ↩
2. “Israel and the Occupied Territories: Civilian Lives Must Be Respected,” Amnesty International, October 2, 2000. ↩
3. “Israel/Occupied Territories/Lebanon: Amnesty International Calls for UN Investigations,” Amnesty International, October 9, 2000. ↩
4. “Israel, The Occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, and the Palestinian Authority Territories: Investigation Into Unlawful Use of Force in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and Northern Israel,” Human Rights Watch, October 2002. ↩
5. “Breakdown of Palestinian Child Deaths (29 September 2000–31 December 2000),” Defence for Children International, Palestine Section, December 31, 2000, as of May 12, 2011 at http://www.dci-pal.org/english/display.cfm?DocId=160&CategoryId=2. ↩
6. “Question of the Violation of Human Rights in the Occupied Arab Territories, Including Palestine: Update to the Mission Report on Israel’s Violations of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories Occupied Since 1967, Submitted by Giorgio Giacomelli, Special Rapporteur to the Commission on Human Rights at its Fifth Special Session,” United Nations Economic and Social Council: Commission on Human Rights, March 16, 2001, E/CN.4/2001/30. ↩
7. “Question of the Violation of Human Rights in the Occupied Arab Territories, Including Palestine: Report of the Human Rights Inquiry Commission Established Pursuant to Commission Resolution S-5/1 of 19 October 2000,” United Nations Economic and Social Council: Commission on Human Rights, March 16, 2001, E/CN.4/2001/121. ↩
8. Israel/Occupied Territories: One Year after the Intifada the International Community Must Fulfil its Obligations,” Amnesty International, September 28, 2001. ↩
9. “US Support for Israel Led to 9/11: Bin Laden Message,” Agence France Presse, September 13, 2009. ↩
10. “The I-Can’t-Believe-I’m-a-Hawk Club,” New York Times, February 8, 2003. ↩
11. “Lies We Still Tell Ourselves about 9/11,” Independent, September 3, 2011. ↩
12. “Saddam’s Bombs: We’ll Find Them,” New York Times, June 20, 2003 ↩

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