AMY GOODMAN: Well, the Bush administration announced last night that the U.S. will soon go to war against terrorism. The media have endlessly pounded on the theme that the U.S. must fight terrorism, attack and destroy terrorist networks, and potentially go to war with nations that harbor or support terrorists.

But there’s been almost no discussion of just what everyone means when they talk about terrorism, although Osama bin Laden has become the virtual embodiment of it in the eyes of the U.S. government. In other countries — Colombia, Iraq, East Timor, the Occupied Territories — the word might include more than that one name.

We’re joined right now by Noam Chomsky, professor of linguistics at MIT, author of dozens of books and articles on U.S. foreign policy, political ideology and terrorism.

Welcome to Democracy Now! in Exile, Noam.

NOAM CHOMSKY: Hi, Amy. How are you?

AMY GOODMAN: It’s great to have you with us, although on this very difficult occasion. I assume you have read what President Bush said last night about terrorism, going after not only individuals, but the countries that harbor and support them. Your response?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, he doesn’t actually mean what he said, of course. Terrorism has a clear definition. It’s clearly defined in the U.S. Code and U.S. Army manuals. It’s defined, without going into the details, as the resort to coercion or violence against a civilian population in order to achieve political, religious or other ends.

And by that definition, it would be impossible not to accept the statement of the ex-president of — ex-prime minister of Indonesia, Abdurrahman Wahid, that the United States is a terrorist state — in fact, one of the leading terrorist states by that definition, by our own definition. In fact, we even have a name for it. It’s called low-intensity warfare, which is — low-intensity conflict, which is actually official military doctrine. And there’s plenty of examples of it.

So, he didn’t mean that. What he meant is what’s usually meant. We define terrorism — anyone defines terrorism as acts of terrorism that they don’t approve of. That’s the practical definition everywhere. So, he means acts of terrorism that we don’t approve of, we will go after by the means that he described. And there’s no doubt that the event in question was a horrendous act of terrorism.

AMY GOODMAN: One of the things that President Bush said is that if you are not with us, you are with the terrorists.

NOAM CHOMSKY: Yeah, yeah, that was already said. We have — we’re offering the world a stark choice, as _The New York Times put it: Either you’re on our side, or you’re destroyed. There are precedents for that, too.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about what this means for countries like Pakistan and, of course, Afghanistan itself?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, it depends what the administration decides to do. I mean, you know, this is — we don’t know. And in fact, there are countercurrents, I’m sure. There must be — there must be a strong current within the administration that’s listening to what they’re being told by foreign leaders, by every specialist who knows the region, I’m sure, by their own intelligence agencies, that if they decide to undertake a massive assault, which will mostly slaughter innocent victims — in fact, victims of the Taliban — if that’s what they decide to do, which is the easy thing — we certainly have the capacity to do that — they will be answering the prayers of bin Laden and his network and falling into what the French foreign minister the other day called a diabolical trap.

The reason is pretty clear. It will — it will lead to — it’s very likely — lead to mobilizing a force — it’ll enable the terrorist networks to mobilize support, appealing to the same kind of reactions that one hears here when — and natural ones, when there’s an atrocity. And that will escalate the cycle of violence in accord with a very familiar dynamic, except in this case at a scale well beyond the usual, leading to enormous crimes elsewhere, and very likely much even worse crimes here. That’s one possibility. I assume that there are elements in the administration paying attention to that. If not, if they lose, and if there is a massive attack, which will kill mostly Afghans, who millions of them are barely on the verge of — survive at the edge of survival now.

As for Pakistan, with your question, well, nobody really knows, but could very well lead to a Taliban-style revolt in Pakistan, which could win and might spread to the Gulf region, maybe to Saudi Arabia, at which point the — quite apart from the horrible fate of the people involved, it will also lead to a threat to the world’s — to U.S. control of the world’s oil supplies, which will never be tolerated. And at this point, we’re off into, you know, indescribable global war. That’s a possibility. I don’t predict it, but it’s not an outlandish possibility.

AMY GOODMAN: We have to break for stations to identify themselves. We’ll come back in a minute with Noam Chomsky. In our second hour today, we’ll be going to London to speak with journalist John Pilger. Tony Blair has come to the United States and visited ground zero yesterday. We’ll go to Belgrade and hear from Jeremy Scahill, the response of those who are also under a reign of terror just a year or two ago. And then we’re going to speak with students around the country. Yesterday was a national day of student protest. You’re listening to Democracy Now! in Exile. Back in a minute.

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AMY GOODMAN: You’re listening to Democracy Now! in Exile, Free Speech Radio, as we break the sound barrier, broadcasting just blocks from what used to be the World Trade Center. This is President Bush last night.

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: And tonight, the United States of America makes the following demands on the Taliban: Deliver to United States authorities all the leaders of al-Qaeda who hide in your land. Release all foreign nationals, including American citizens, you have unjustly imprisoned. Protect foreign journalists, diplomats and aid workers in your country. Close immediately and permanently every terrorist training camp in Afghanistan. And hand over every terrorist and every person in their support structure to appropriate authorities. Give the United States full access to terrorist training camps, so we can make sure they are no longer operating. These demands are not open to negotiation or discussion.

AMY GOODMAN: President Bush addressing the nation last night. We’re speaking with professor Noam Chomsky. Noam, you’ve written extensively about terrorism that the United States government has supported or engaged in. Can you put this in historical context?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, perhaps a good way to do it is to take — let’s take one case which is not controversial, because, in fact, there’s a judgment of the World Court, the highest possible judicial authority, condemning the United States for what it called the unlawful use of force — that’s international terrorism, that the U.S. — of course, this is the case brought by Nicaragua against the United States. The U.S. rejected the judgment, of course, escalated the attack. Nicaragua went to the Security Council, which called on all states to observe international law. The U.S. vetoed it. So, there’s a World Court and a Security Council declaration demanding that the United States cease its international terrorism — of course, dismissed.

Suppose Nicaragua put President Bush’s comments that you just — we just heard in context. Let’s imagine that Nicaragua had said the same thing and was in a position to do it. Let’s say they had Mars behind them or something like that. Suppose that Nicaragua said that given the decision of the World Court, authoritative decision, the Security Council resolution, they demanded, with no negotiations, that the United States hand over at once everyone involved in any way in the international terrorist attack against Nicaragua, which was very serious, tens of thousands of people killed, the country virtually destroyed, and that they allow Nicaragua to inspect all U.S. military bases anywhere remotely in the region, all support systems, the ideological institutions, such as The New York Times, which was drum beating for the war virtually without exception, and so on. How would we — and that if that didn’t happen, the U.S. would be obliterated. That’s a comparable — that’s rather comparable. How would we react? Of course, it’s not a credible threat. It’s only a credible threat when it’s made by a superpower that’s not under control. But the cases are not dissimilar, except that the attack on Nicaragua was far worse.

AMY GOODMAN: I just read in the news headlines a story from the British newspaper The Guardian about the U.S. plans to press its European allies to agree to a military campaign to topple the Taliban regime and replace it with an interim administration under United Nations auspices. Diplomatic cables from the Washington Embassy of a key NATO ally report that the U.S. is keen to hear allied views on a post-Taliban Afghanistan after the liberation of the country. And it says that the U.S. military strategy appears to entail supporting the campaign of the exiled 86-year-old monarch of Afghanistan, King Zahir Shah, to return to power by encouraging the guerrilla army of the Northern Alliance opposition to fall in behind him. Diplomatic documents show that Washington is funding and organizing the travel of several Northern Alliance figures to Rome to confer with the exiled monarch, who’s expected to call on all Afghan tribes to rise up in revolution against the Taliban. What is your comment on that?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, we have a little historical experience there, too, all over the world, in fact, with regimes that the U.S. has instituted, like the — I mean, in Indonesia, Guatemala, all over the place, total horror, some of the worst horror stories of the 20th century.

But just let’s take Afghanistan. Where did the Taliban come from? Where did the Taliban regime come from? Well, you know, its roots are in operations organized beginning in 1979 by the CIA, French intelligence, Egypt, backing from Israel, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, to try to organize an army of radical Islamic fundamentalists to carry out a holy war. If we can believe former national security adviser Brzezinski, Zbigniew Brzezinski, he takes credit for having, as he puts it, drawn the Russians into an Afghan trap — that’s his phrase — in 1979 by beginning to send aid to mujahideen who were fighting against the government, in the hope that the Russians would intervene and fall into an Afghan trap. That is reminiscent of French Foreign Minister Védrine’s words the other day about the United States falling into a diabolical trap set by bin Laden, and he may have been thinking of it, because French intelligence was, in fact, instrumental in drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap. Incidentally, I say “if” we believe Brzezinski, which is a question. He may be bragging. But that’s the claim at least.

The CIA and its associates did look for the best killers they could find, naturally, who happened to be radical Islamists, what are called here fundamentalists, and they were brutal and murderous. The U.S. armed them, trained them. They carried out terrorist attacks inside Russia with CIA support. And incidentally, they almost immediately turned against their creators. So, one of their first acts was to assassinate President Sadat of Egypt, who was the most enthusiastic of the coalition that was forming, and that was 1981. 1983, a single suicide bomber, probably loosely connected to the same network, drove the U.S. military out of Lebanon virtually. And it continued after the Russians did withdraw from Afghanistan, possibly delayed by these actions, many specialists believe — anyway, did withdraw, and that war was won. They simply turned elsewhere.

I mean, since then, they’ve been carrying out terrorist attacks in — against their main enemies: Egypt, Saudi Arabia, other corrupt and repressive governments of the region which they regard as un-Islamic, and those who support them. They’re fighting in Chechnya. They’re fighting in western China, Kashmir, Bosnia. I mean, the roots of Hamas in Gaza and the West Bank go back there, too.

And they’re attacking the United States, which bin Laden himself has — he’s been very outspoken about this. No big secret. When U.S. forces established a permanent military base in Saudi Arabia, the one from which they are now planning to, or at least saying they’re going to, bomb Afghanistan, he and his network immediately described that as comparable to the Russian occupation of Afghanistan, although far worse because of Saudi Arabia’s significance as the site of the holiest shrines and so on. So, then, yes, going to go to war against them, just as the CIA trained them to go to war against the Russian occupiers.

So, there is a history of U.S. And out of this, the U.S., came the Taliban. I mean, you know, it’s a couple of years later, but sort of grows out of the same — of the same networks and background. So, we can — we already have succeeded, and after the Russians withdrew, the mujahideen, the various groups that had been formed and created, they just tore the country apart, frankly, destroyed the place. One of the reasons why the Taliban, terrible as they are, were more or less welcomed is that they at least calmed the internal battling that was destroying what was left of the country. So, we have 20 years of experience in Afghanistan itself of U.S. efforts to establish a regime, yeah, and it ends up with the Taliban.

AMY GOODMAN: Noam, what do you think is the most important thing to understand about Osama bin Laden? And do you think that the U.S. government has the evidence to demand that he be sent out of Afghanistan or to say that he’s a prime suspect?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, you know, if you ask my opinion, I would assume that Osama bin Laden and his network are responsible for the — for this act. However, the stress should be on the word “network.” It’s a very loosely affiliated, nonhierarchic structure. You know, in a way, it’s familiar to the kind of affinity groups we’re used to. A nonhierarchic, decentralized structure immediately develops in resistance situations and others, because it’s essentially immune to penetration. It’s not likely that Osama bin Laden, hiding in some cave in Afghanistan, was able to literally direct an operation as sophisticated and horrendous as the one that took place on September 11th, but probably goes out of the loose network. I mean, Bush said last night that these are in 60 countries all over the place, and that’s right.

If the United States — much of the world has been asking for evidence. So, a couple of days ago, the Arab League said, “If you can provide us with some evidence, we will join the attack against this kind of terrorism,” which they hate even more than the United States does, because they’re the main victims of it, targets of it. But the United States can’t present the evidence, and it’s not likely that they’ll be able to. It’s going to be hard to find credible evidence about a structure like that, in which most of the people — the people directly involved killed themselves, so you can’t go after them. And not only the network, but even its financial resources are, you know, informal, limited, spread all over the place. To try to literally destroy the network and all of its supporters would mean destroying, you know, half the world. In this sense, the call for — I mean, NATO, too. has asked for specific — for evidence, and they can’t get it. But it’s a plausible surmise that that’s what’s behind it.

But what do you do in such a case? You have two choices. You can just go bomb, kill maybe millions of Afghans, and then answer bin Laden’s prayers, escalate the cycle of violence. Yeah, you can do that. The alternative is to pursue — is to follow the statement of the U.S. bishops that was announced yesterday: follow national and international law. That means pursue the series of steps that, for example, Nicaragua pursued. I mean, I presume they had the capacity to set off bombs in Washington, even if not to bomb the United States. They didn’t. They went to the World Court, received the decision in their favor, went to the Security Council — U.S. blocked it — went to the General Assembly several times, a unanimous vote that the U.S. should stop its attack. U.S. and Israel opposed, and then they couldn’t do anything more. But nobody’s going to stop the United States if it follows the proper principles of national and international law.

I mean, let’s take a domestic example. Just, you know, no two cases are similar, but it tells you something. Let’s take the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City. The initial calls, as I’m sure you remember, were “Let’s bomb the Middle East. Kill the bastards.” And if there had been any link, however minimal, to the Middle East, that’s probably what would have happened. When it was found to have its roots in the U.S. militia movement, those calls stopped. Nobody called for bombing Montana and Idaho to root out the whole militia movement. They went after the perpetrator, tried to discover the perpetrator. They found them, brought them to the courts.

And then comes the next step, if you’re serious: Why did it happen? You look into the roots of the militia movement. And the fact of the matter is — we should be honest enough to face this — that when almost every crime you can think of, whether it’s a robbery in the streets or a colossal atrocity, there are some reasons behind it. And if you’re serious, if you want to reduce the threat of further crimes rather than enhance them, what you do is look into the reasons. And you almost invariably find that some — among those reasons, whether it’s Oklahoma City or World Trade Center or a crime in the streets, that some of them are serious, and they ought to be addressed.

And again, you have a choice. If you want to reduce the threat of violence, you think about those things. If you want to escalate the threat of violence against yourself, as well, then you disregard it and just lash out violently. Those are almost always the choices. In the case of Oklahoma City, the proper response, after following the right criminal procedures, was to look into the reasons and ask where this is coming from and try to — and insofar as they’re authentic, and, to some extent, they are, alleviate them.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Noam Chomsky, I want to thank you very much for being with us. As usual, it’s not enough time, but thank you for the beginning. Noam Chomsky, professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

And that does it for today’s program. Democracy Now! in Exile is produced by Kris Abrams, Brad Simpson, Miranda Kennedy. Anthony Sloan is our music maestro and engineer. Errol Maitland is at the helm at WBIX.org, with Ryme, Karen Ranucci, Adriene Jenik, Rick Jungers, Hoi Ngo, Jeff Galusha, Lyle Davies, DeeDee Halleck, Jon Alpert, Keiko Tsuno, Tony Riddle, Chase Pierson, Lenny Charles. Thanks all for helping us out. Democracy Now! broadcasting from DCTV, Engine House 31, from — in exile from the embattled studios of WBAI. Yes, folks, we are Pacifica. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks for listening to another edition of Ground Zero Radio.

[End of Hour 1]

AMY GOODMAN: From Ground Zero Radio, this is Democracy Now! in Exile.

JOHN PILGER: We’ve had some of the British victims of the World Trade Center bombings. One man is quoted this morning as saying that Bush ought to be caged. This is not — I think it was his brother. I’m not sure, but I think it was his brother who died. And he — just paraphrasing him, he felt his brother didn’t die for a lot of other innocent people to die. That’s a very — that’s a very admirable logic expressed by someone who must be grieving so deeply.

AMY GOODMAN: British Prime Minister Tony Blair and U.S. senators visit ground zero yesterday as President Bush announces the U.S. will be going to war. We’ll speak with British journalist John Pilger about the British role in dealing with the issue of world terrorism. We’ll go to Belgrade, as well as around the United States, to students rallying for peace.

All that and more, coming up.

Welcome to Democracy Now! in Exile, broadcasting just blocks from where the towers of the World Trade Center once stood.

The figures have increased close to a thousand, to more than 6,000 people who are now unaccounted for. Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers today refused to hand over Osama bin Laden and warned that U.S. attempts to apprehend him by force would plunge the whole region into crisis. The announcement came hours after President George Bush demanded Afghanistan immediately deliver bin Laden and shut down what he called every terrorist training camp in the country or face military attack. The Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, Abdul Salam Zaeef, called for an investigation into the attacks by the United Nations, saying, “Our position on this is that if America has proof, we are ready for the trial of Osama bin Laden in light of the evidence.” Zaeef also said he was sorry people died in the suicide jet attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, but appealed to the United States not to endanger innocent people in a military retaliation, and said President Bush’s ultimatum poses great danger for Muslims.

And fearful of offending Muslims, the Pentagon is rethinking and will probably change the code name Operation Infinite Justice, that it initially suggested for the planned U.S. retaliation against those it considers responsible for last week’s terrorist attacks, this according to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. At a Pentagon briefing, Rumsfeld was told by a reporter that several Islamic scholars had objected to the name, arguing that only God or Allah can impose infinite justice. Rumsfeld replied, “I understand. I understand. And obviously, the United States doesn’t want to do or say anything that creates the impression on the part of the listener that would be a misunderstanding, and clearly that would be.” Rumsfeld, who will decide what to call the operation, said he did not know if “infinite justice” would be retained, but added, “I doubt it.” A Pentagon official said Operation Infinite Justice was a working name that was never officially approved. Rear Admiral Craig Quigley, a Pentagon spokesperson, said names for such operations are suggested by the staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to the secretary of defense, who ultimately decides what to call them.

And the London-based newspaper The Guardian is reporting that the U.S. government is pressing its European allies to agree to a military campaign to topple the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and replace it with an interim administration under United Nations auspices.

The Guardian also learned two large U.S. Hercules transport aircraft landed in Tashkent, capital of the former Soviet Republic of Uzbekistan, loaded with surveillance equipment to be installed along the northern Afghan border. The secret landing represents a radical departure, since it appears to herald the deployment of squadrons of U.S. fighters at Uzbekistan’s sprawling airfield of Termez, directly on the border. Such a buildup would incur the wrath of Russia, which views the Central Asian republics as its backyard.

The Guardian is also saying that another plank in the U.S. military strategy appears to entail supporting the campaign of the exiled 86-year-old monarch of Afghanistan, King Zahir Shah, to return to power by encouraging the military, the guerrilla army of the Northern Alliance opposition, to fall in behind him. Diplomatic documents seen by The Guardian show that Washington is funding and organizing the travel of several Northern Alliance figures to Rome to confer with the exiled monarch, who is expected to call on all the Afghan tribes to rise up in revolution against the Taliban.

Meanwhile, at least 1 million Afghans face starvation if the World Food Programme cannot return evacuated staff to the country and resume its normal operations there.

The 15 nations of the European Union approved tough new anti-terrorist measures yesterday to close legal loopholes that allow terrorism suspects to evade arrest. In the wake of the attacks on the United States, EU justice and home affairs ministers approved 37 proposals aimed at preventing terrorist groups, they said, from operating in the European Union and at strengthening police and justice cooperation with the United States. Key provisions include a European search and arrest warrant, which will allow authorities in all 15 states to search for suspects sought for terrorism in any EU state and streamlined extradition procedures. Other measures include a common definition of terrorist crimes and guidelines for sentencing convicted terrorists, including a minimum penalty of 20 years for murder. Ministers also agreed to set up an anti-terrorist unit with Europol, Europe’s police investigation organization.

In related news, the Italian Parliament approved a report on July’s violence-ridden Group of 8 summit in Genoa that absolves security forces of blame, and described the meeting as a total success. Opposition center-left parties denounced the finding of the official parliamentary commission as a whitewash and published their own conclusions, saying poor law enforcement are largely to blame for the mayhem. One protester was killed by police. More than 300 people were injured, and at least 200 people were arrested.

An embarrassed Pentagon yesterday was forced to rethink its choice of the code name Operation Infinite Justice. And The New York Times is reporting, although racial profiling has been harshly criticized, courts in this country have never declared it legally dead. Now with law enforcement officials focusing on Arabs and the hunt for terrorists, legal experts say profiling may be authorized by judges more definitively than ever before. Some opponents of racial profiling say their efforts may have been set back decades by indications that people who fit a single description, men of Arab descent, were responsible for the devastation. Civil liberties lawyers say there are signs of profiling in the patterns of arrests so far, and security experts say profiling is inevitable in the drive for increased air safety.