World mourns 9-11 victims but criticises US response

HONG KONG: Newspapers Monday remembered the victims of the September 11 attacks and condemned those responsible, but many also expressed deep unease at the US government's reaction to the atrocity.

On the fifth anniversary of Al-Qaeda's assault on New York and Washington, editorials united in condemning the attacks which stunned the world and briefly rallied global opinion behind the United States.

Papers said many people were still grappling with the immensity of what happened that day. However many papers said Washington had destroyed the reservoir of good will through the way it had prosecuted its 'war-on-terror', most notably by invading Iraq and refusing to abide by the Geneva Conventions.

Britain's Independent newspaper remembered five years ago "images of a world briefly united in sympathy for an America reeling and grieving from the attack on the Twin Towers and the deaths of almost 3,000 New Yorkers."

"How moving but dated they seem today," the paper said, lamenting the daily slaughter in Iraq, the nuclear crisis in Iran, the growing insurgency in Afghanistan and the failure to address the Israeli-Palestine issue.

The Financial Times said: "The way the Bush administration has trampled on the international rule of law and Geneva Conventions, while abrogating civil liberties and expanding executive power at home, has done huge damage not only to America's reputation but, more broadly, to the attractive power of Western values."

The left-leaning French newspaper Liberation said US President George W. Bush's reaction to the September 11 attacks had helped to make the world a more dangerous place. "The Bush administration has succeeded in destroying the huge pool of compassion and solidarity which gripped the world after September 11," said the paper. "Bush's 'leadership' in the 'war-on-terror' has been disastrous."

In Germany, the economic daily Handelsblatt said the war in Iraq had been started in the name of September 11.

"Today, it is known: the skeptics were right. The war in Iraq was based on false assumptions, which were used knowingly or not. The war in Iraq had nothing to do with Al-Qaeda terrorism ", the daily said. The Spanish daily El Pais said the Bush administration had used the attacks to impose a neo-conservative foreign policy.

"The result, five years after, is a more dangerous world," it said. "But the worst is than the methods of the terrorists contaminated the spirit of the democracies which fight them."

Hong Kong, Monday, AFP