SAN FRANCISCO: A University of Colorado professor, Ward Churchill, has sparked controversy over an essay in which he maintains that people killed in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks were not innocent victims.

In the essay written after the September 11 attacks, Ward Churchill said the World Trade Centre victims were "little Eichmanns," a reference to Adolf Eichmann, who ensured the smooth running of the Nazi system. He called their deaths a "penalty befitting their participation in . . . the "mighty engine of profit" to which the military dimension of US policy has always been enslaved".

Churchill's essay - Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens - argues that the 9/11 attacks were in retaliation for the Iraqi children killed in a 1991 US bombing raid and by economic sanctions imposed on Iraq by the United Nations following the Gulf War.

The essay also contends the hijackers who crashed airplanes into the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon were "combat teams," not terrorists. It states: "The most that can honestly be said of those involved is that they finally responded in kind to some of what this country has dispensed to their people as a matter of course."

The essay written in 2001 soon after the 9/11 attacks attracted little attention until Churchill was invited to speak last month at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, which later cancelled his talk out of security concerns. Radio talk-show hosts vilified him as a hate-monger and Fox News organized an Internet lynch mob, a collection of cyber-goons - one of whom threatened to bring a gun to Hamilton College.

The 57-year-old professor of ethnic studies has refused to apologize; on the contrary, he has threatened to sue the University if it fires him. Churchill has blamed "widespread and grossly inaccurate media coverage" for the furor. He insisted that he had not defended the attacks but rather had pointed out that "if US foreign policy results in massive death and destruction abroad, we cannot feign innocence when some of that destruction is returned."

The American Civil Liberties Union, a leading civil rights organization, has issued a statement defending Churchill's right to speak out and called on the university regents, legislators and the Colorado State Governor Bill Owens "to stop threatening Mr Churchill's job because of the content of his Opinions". The governor has urged the university to fire him.

The familiarity of what Ward Churchill wrote comes from the books and extensive articles in US publications that have been written in recent years on this very subject, with the same accusatory finger for Sept. 11 pointed directly at the US and its citizenry for closing a blind eye to the US adventures overseas.

In an equally devastatingly self-blaming article, Chalmers Johnson, president of the Japan Policy Research Institute said: "The suicidal assassins of Sept. 11, 2001, did not 'attack America,' as our political leaders and the news media like to maintain; they attacked American foreign policy." Johnson wrote the article entitled "Blowback" in the Nation magazine on Oct. 15, 2001, about the same time Prof Ward Churchill wrote his essay.

"Blowback" is a CIA term first used in March 1954 in a recently declassified report on the 1953 operation to overthrow the government of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran. It is a metaphor for the unintended consequences of the US government's international activities that have been kept secret from the American people.

"On the day of the disaster," Johnson continued, "President George W. Bush told the American people that we were attacked because we are 'a beacon for freedom,' and because the attackers were 'evil'. In his address to Congress on Sept. 20, he said, 'This is civilization's fight'.

"This attempt to define difficult-to-grasp events as only a conflict over abstract values - as a 'clash of civilizations,' in current post-cold war American jargon - is not only disingenuous, but also a way of evading responsibility for the 'blowback' that America's imperial projects have generated."

The morning of Sept. 11, 2001, he actually believed the horrors were the work of Chileans. 9/11, Johnson pointed out, is the date in 1973 when the US sponsored the overthrow of the elected government of Salvador Allende. "No Chilean has ever forgotten," he added.

"It could, too, have been Greeks, Okinawans, any number of African nationals, Argentines, Brazilians - you name it. That the attacks were mostly carried out by Saudis was not a surprise."

Like Ward Churchill, Chalmers Johnson says the Pentagon, in the context of blowback and warfare, was a "legitimate military target, no question." The destruction of the World Trade Centre, he adds, was "not legitimate. Clearly it was a symbol," he said, "but it was pure terrorism."