May 2008 archive

A better searcher may be able to locate an earlier use of the term, but, as far as I can tell, it took less than 48-hours for the term to be used regarding 9.11.  In other words, ‘the crazy black guy’ didn’t make it up…  Sorry folks.  

Cornwall Standard Freeholder (Ontario)

September 13, 2001 Thursday

American policy abroad at root of terrorist acts

BYLINE: Harry Valentine, Standard-Freeholder

To the editor:

By now, most people reading this would have seen TV coverage of the jetliners being crashed into the World Trade Centre buildings in New York City. The magnitude of this event may not be easy to fathom.

…

These people represented the American economy and the Western way of life. Yet, in far away lands, America is despised. America is seen as the bully which intrudes into the domestic affairs of other nations.

America facilitates military coups, such as the one which brought Chile’s Pinochet to power and supported repressive dictators like a Philippine Marcos. America bombed innocent civilians in Vietnam and in Iraq. Millions of people abroad have suffered due to American intervention. The tragic spectacle which occurred in New York City happened to a lesser extent, but more often, in trouble lands overseas.

Now the chickens have come home to roost, right in the U.S.A. Innocent American civilians now struggle to comprehend the horror that has now been visited on their shores. Most are unaware of what their government has done abroad and over a period of many years.

Presently, it is unknown as to who orchestrated the horror in New York. The last time a building in the U.S.A. was bombed with a shocking loss of life, it was done by a former U.S. serviceman who was disgruntled over American governmental behaviour. Whoever was behind crashing the airplanes into the buildings evidently wanted to send a strong message of disapproval to Washington.

Hell, it was even the TITLE of this article:

Sydney Morning Herald (Australia)

September 15, 2001 Saturday

Late Edition

America’s chickens come home to roost

BYLINE: ALAN RAMSEY

`BAA, bah Moscow/Your troops are in Kabul/You cannot have our athletes/But you can certainly have our wool.” Remember it? Maybe not. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 and the Fraser government’s uncritical support, in an election year, for the Carter doctrine of US support for the Islamic mujahideen (“holy warriors”) guerilla groups, in their US proxy war against the Soviet-backed Afghan regime of Babrak Karmal, was a long time ago.

Twenty-two years later the Americans are reaping the consequences of a monster they helped create but could not control; and Australia, again, is “shoulder to shoulder” with Washington, just as Bob Hawke was in February 1991 when he went to war in the Gulf with the father, and now John Howard, in an election year, is pledging to go to war with the son.

It took almost TWO WEEKS for it to be used in The Washington Post:

The Washington Post

September 23, 2001 Sunday

Castro Warns About U.S. Military Plans;

Cuba’s President Says Fighting Could Lead to ‘Infinite Killing of Innocent People’

Kevin Sullivan, Washington Post Foreign Service

Fidel Castro  said today that the U.S. government was run by “extremists” and “hawks” whose military response to the Sept. 11 terror attacks in New York and Washington could turn into an “infinite killing of innocent people.”

“Their capacity to destroy and kill is enormous, but their traits of equanimity, serenity, reflection and caution are, on the other hand, minimal,” Castro said, addressing more than 50,000 flag-waving Cubans in this small tobacco-producing town 20 miles south of Havana.

“In the name of justice and under the strange title of ‘Infinite Justice,’ the tragedy should not be used to irresponsibly start a war that, in reality, could turn into an infinite killing of innocent people,” said Castro, whose government’s statements about the attacks have grown increasingly shrill.

…

Castro recited several passages from President Bush’s address to Congress on Thursday. He said Bush’s call to arms could turn into a “struggle against ghosts they don’t know where to find — if they exist or not — [and] whether those they will kill have any responsibility” in the terror attacks. In the “strange holy war that is about to start, it’s impossible to tell on which side there is more fanaticism,” he said.

….

In the wake of the terror attacks, as the Bush administration has shifted from grief to war planning, Cuba has shifted its emphasis from sympathy for the victims to condemnation of U.S. policy.

Recent government statements, believed to reflect Castro’s views, have said the “chickens have come home to roost” for a nation that has “for more than five decades promoted terrorism on an enormous scale across the globe.” Opinions on nightly television news “round-tables,” which largely promote the government line, have also grown increasingly sharp.

Seattle Weekly

October 11, 2001, Thursday

RELIGIOUS WAR?

BYLINE: nina shapiro

Robert Burrowes is a specialist on Yemen at the Jackson School of International Studies:

Yemen is illustrative of the extent to which most of what I call revolutionary political Islam, particularly in the last couple of decades, really is tied to Afghanistan. It was the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan that led to the call for militant Islamists to come to Pakistan, train, and then go fight in Afghanistan. And this was largely a CIA and Saudi conceived, designed, organized, funded project–it was a Cold War project.

What happens when the Cold War ends is that the U.S. and the Saudis end their support, and the chickens come home to roost. These Arabs, now called Afghani Arabs or Arab Afghanis, from Algeria, Egypt, Yemen, Jordan, Saudi Arabia itself (like bin Laden), the Sudan, even from the Philippines, Indonesia–these people began to filter back. The Arabs from all these different countries, who by this time had become more militant Islamists, were a peer group. They had interacted with one another, and they had learned how to fight.

A significant portion came from Yemen, but a much larger group filtered back into the Arab world by way of Yemen because the government was so weak, the borders were so porous. This, I think, explains why you had in the mid-1990s militant Islamic activity.

United Press International

November 6, 2001, Tuesday



U.S., Saudi chickens come home to roost

By MARTIN SIEFF, Senior News Analyst

A specter is haunting the Bush administration and the ruling House of Saud in Saudi Arabia. It is that the hypocrisies, double standards and deliberate blind eyes that both governments have practiced for two decades may now be coming back to haunt them.

Saudi Arabia has been a major strategic partner of the United States ever since the mid-1950s, when it replaced Texas as the key “swing” oil producer for the whole world.

…

But the Washington-Riyadh partners did far more than that. Saudi Arabia also poured vast funds in Pakistan with Washington’s eager approval. And it also bankrolled the mujahedin, Muslim “warriors of God” that the United States supported in their fight against the invading Soviet Red Army in Afghanistan. And in 1986, when the Soviets appeared to have finally turned the tide against the Islamic mujahedin, the United States tipped the scales in their favor again by supplying them with limitless quantities of hand-held Stinger anti-aircraft missiles.

In doing so, they taught the young rising generation of Muslim extremists, radicalized by their Saudi-funded schooling, that they could take on a superpower and beat it. Now the United States itself must face the consequences of that confidence in Afghanistan.

From America’s point of view, it all seemed to work so well. At least for two decades. But since the Sept. 11 slaughter of between 3,000 to 5,000 Americans in the World Trade Towers in New York City, American policymakers are nervously being forced to acknowledge the significance of other factors they have been only too happy to ignore over the past two decades.

…

The Bush administration has so far put no pressure on the Saudis over this and made no recriminations. On the contrary, as UPI Analysis and UPI Hears have reported on an ongoing basis, U.S. foreign policy since Sept. 11 has tilted dramatically in directions the Saudis wanted it to go. The Palestinians and the Pakistanis have been courted and Israel and India pressured intensely to refrain from retaliation against terrorist attacks from Islamic groups.

Whether it was indeed roosting chickens is a rather weighty subject since the consensus opinion is that the nineteen people in the jets are best explained away as irrational hateful aberrations…  They did it because they ‘hated our freedom’ and our ability to buy shit at Walmart, right?

Tomorrow we shall discuss what “God’s will” means, and how it isn’t and is about these roosting chickens…