9/11 was a terrorist atrocity, says Noam Chomsky, and so was the US reaction to it.

The claim that the U.S. was attacked on 9/11 because, as George W Bush put it, they hate our freedoms was completely untenable. They hated our policies. In fact, it would be more accurate to say we hate their freedoms.

Evidence about that is enormous, back to the '50s. So, for example, in 1958, President Eisenhower, in internal documents long since released, raised the question with his staff about why there's a campaign of hatred against us in the Arab world, not from the governments, but from the people.

The National Security Council had just released a study on this in which they concluded there’s a perception in the Arab world that the United States supports harsh, oppressive dictatorships and that the U.S. blocks democracy and development and that we do it because we want to keep control over their energy resources.

The study went on to say that this is fairly accurate, and that’s pretty much what we should be doing, as long as the populations are kept quiet.

And so it goes on. Right up to the present. Obama has succeeded in descending even below George W. Bush in approval in the Arab world. It’s minuscule, a few percent.

So, we should understand where atrocities come from. They don’t come from nowhere. And if we’re serious, we should try to do something about what is the basis for them.

There were much more constructive alternatives to what followed 9/11. The 9/11 attack was pretty harshly criticized throughout the Muslim world, but particularly in the jihadi movement.

It’s very likely that it would have been possible to split the jihadi movement, to isolate al-Qaeda, to move to apprehend the suspects—and, of course, in our system of justice, theoretically, people are suspects unless they’re sentenced—treat it as a criminal action, try to make use of the fact that there was tremendous antagonism to this even among the jihadi movement, and move on to a much more constructive relationship with the general Muslim-Arab world.

That path wasn’t taken. Instead it was decided to lash out violently, first in Afghanistan, then in Iraq. That simply following Osama bin Laden’s playbook, as was pointed out pretty quickly by people like Michael Scheuer, head of the CIA task force that was tracking bin Laden. He ended up concluding the United States is bin Laden’s best ally. We’re helping his goal to mobilize the Muslim world around the fear that the United States is attacking Islam and carrying out a crusade: they have to defend themselves.

The invasion of Iraq, particularly, gave a big shot in the arm to the jihadi extremists. It was predicted by U.S. and British intelligence agencies that the attack on Iraq would increase terror, and it did, by a factor of seven the first year, according to RAND Corporation quasi-governmental statistics.

That’s what happens when you lash out violently without seeking to understand the nature of what’s happening and pursuing the options for diplomatic, peaceful, negotiated settlements, and treating crimes as crimes.

When there’s a crime, you try to identify the likely perpetrators, apprehend them,  bring them to a fair trial. That could have been done. There were tentative offers from the Taliban to allow a trial of bin Laden. Could that have succeeded? We can only speculate. It was not pursued. The U.S. just dismissed it: "We don’t talk to you."

It truly could have been done on May 2nd this year, when U.S. commandos apprehended bin Laden—defenceless, with his wife and with no weapons—and assassinated him, then dumped his body at sea. That’s the kind of action which is bound to increase speculation, cynicism, doubt—quite different from what in fact should have been done.

One of the leading British legal specialists, a civil libertarian, pointed out that the way the assassination was carried out was criminal and dangerous in its implications. He compared it to the treatment of the far more horrendous war criminals after the Second World War. He pointed out that the British government wanted to just kill the Nazi leaders, but the U.S. government, or President Truman, insisted that they be tried. The Nuremberg trials followed, which had their flaws, but at least did bring out in public the nature of the crimes.

The trials also led to an important conclusion by the U.S. chief prosecutor, Justice Robert Jackson. He informed the tribunal that we were handing these defendants a "poisoned chalice," and if we ever sip from it, if we ever commit the same crime of aggression—one of the major crimes—then we must suffer the same punishment as the Nazi accused, or else make the Nuremberg trials a farce.