9/11/11
Where was I on September 11th, 2001? I'm going to try and start a trend here and not tell you. The approaching 10th anniversary of the date is fast becoming an exercise in narcissism disguised as community empathy by Americans. It's an exploitative profit machine for our mainstream news media.September 11th was no doubt a monumental date in our nation's history. Our reaction to it brought to the visible surface all of our insecurity and hypocrisy. It delivered a full-body embrace of our bullying nature towards the rest of the world, our tendencies to panic, recklessness, and callousness. The citizens of the dying empire cried out in pain for their own victims and the vulnerability of their empire in a way that they never could for the lesser humans living outside our borders.
In a cruel twist to the story of 9/11/2001, the perpetrators of the violence against us killed themselves at the end of their mission. This left us twisting briefly in the breeze for vengeance, but we found substitutes of the same skin color and religion to torture and kill in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, and dozens of other countries through our "covert military operations". We rounded up the political enemies of regional warlords, shipped them by the hundreds without trial or charge to our national concentration camp in Cuba where they could be drowned, burned, and psychologically destroyed for an indeterminate amount of time. We farmed out some of our torture too (and still do) to allies like The New Hitler Moammar Gadhafi. Better that a hundred men and boys be tortured and murdered in secret than a guilty man go free.
Six thousand U.S. soldiers have been killed since. Add them to the rolls of the 9/11 dead. 550,000 more that have served during the decade have filed disability claims with their government. Not that they matter so much, but a million or more are dead too in some of the countries that we invaded. Eight million have become refugees or been displaced from their homes, probably for good. We were like a peculiar man that gets his pocket picked in a crowded market. The thief has fled without identification and so the man finds justice instead by putting on a blindfold and wildly swinging a baseball bat.
We turned on ourselves too. Oh, did we turn on ourselves. A national surveillance state was established. We wiretapped peace protesting organic farmers in Iowa City. We searched undercover for "evil" in mosques from city to city, coast to coast. We've strangled the long, enduring lifeblood of the nation by clamping down on immigration. We turned air travel into a national satire of three-ounce liquid containers and public gropings. Whistleblowers to our Constitutional crimes have increasingly become the prime targets of the nation's "Justice" department. Not just information "leakers" either, but even those that espouse or repeat unpopular political opinions. Constitutionally-protected political speech under court precedent has been criminalized. Just last week, a 24-year-old Virginia man was charged with "providing material support" and "propaganda" to a terrorist organization because he posted a 5 minute video on YouTube that featured "jihad" messages and clips of U.S. fun and games at the Abu Ghraib torture facility in Iraq. He faces 23 years in prison. A Pakistani cable TV provider living in New York City was prosecuted and sentenced to six years in prison in his state for offering a Hezbollah news channel in some of his channel packages.
And of course we have Anwar Awlaki, referenced here several times before thanks to the news exposure by Glenn Greenwald. He's the U.S. citizen sentenced to assassination by our anti-war president, the former Constitutional law professor, despite never having been convicted or even charged with a crime. If Western countries were held accountable for their human rights violations in the way we hold tinpot dictators accountable in developing countries, a pair of U.S. presidents and a paddy-wagon full of cabinet officials would be considered war criminals.
This anniversary is a sad occasion to be sure. Over the course of a decade, the 9/11 dead have been disgraced by our military industry, its profiteers, their government, and the whole of their fellow citizenry who have done virtually nothing to hold the lawless military and government accountable for their actions. They've been martyred again by our inability to live with our neighbors in peace or with even a crumb of humility.
posted by CM @ 6:07 PM
6 Comments:
You would rather we just turn the other cheek and say "Thank you Mr. bin Laden, may we have another?"
War isn't pretty and sometimes things don't go the way they should. Certainly the humans involved in making the decisions and executing the orders are prone to mistakes. But I think America is safer today that it was on 9/10/01.
I understand and can appreciate some of your criticisms of the leadership over the last 10 years. It is the duty of citizens to stand up and point out mistakes that have been made so the general public and future leaders can work to correct those mistakes if possible and also avoid repeating them.
But you sound like a broken record. There is a quote I like that goes something like this..."It is a true sign of intelligence when someone can hold two opposing thoughts in their head at once and still function." When all you do is spout the same rhetoric over and over, you sound stupid.
So, I am going to challenge you to prove that you are intelligent. I would like to see you do some research and put up a separate post (not just a reply to this comment) that talks about all the right decisions that have been made in the war on terror over the last 10 years. Even if they were decisions you didn't agree with but still got the job done, I want to hear you acknowledge that there are steps that have been taken that make America a better place today. And maybe just throw a little thank you on the end to the leaders, generals, commanders, and foot soldiers that carried out those decisions.
What you call a broken record I call tenacity. I don't abandon the subject of our illegal wars as other sites have just because the news cycle moved on from it six years ago and the topic lost its ability to sell toothpaste and boner pills to the American consumer.
The "War on Terror" does not have two sides. It is fundamentally fraudulent. It is the excuse of a corrupt government to steal the natural resources of other countries, and to chill into silence anybody that tries to hold it accountable when it does. Your premise implies that we are free to look upon the specific methods of our government with a critical eye, but the criticism must end there because, fundamentally, our intentions are honorable and we all have the same goal in mind. But they aren't and we don't.
Our government's intent, for some time, has been to rape and destroy other cultures, if necessary, so long as a multi-national's stock price can rise 25 cents a share at the opening bell tomorrow morning. We have a war of terror designed to create MORE terrorists because there's more money in building weapons and in theft by government subsidy than there is in peace. Ours is a policy now of Endless War, as Candidate McCain even admitted in 2008, and it cannot be condoned morally in any way, in any universe, or under any tenant of our so-called religions of morality. "War is hell" is no longer an acceptable excuse for the actions of an evolved society, and the defense of criminal acts committed in the shadow of war, you should know, went out at Nuremberg.
Two sides, let's see. Our soldiers break into a house in Ishaqi, Iraq, handcuff and execute an extended family, including five children and four women. Then the war crime is covered up by ordering an air strike against the entire neighborhood. All details of these evil acts are judged "classified" by the military hierarchy for five years, and then the ultimate leaker of the information online, who is now deemed to be the criminal, becomes the target of prosecution by the justice department. The mainstream media, our watchdogs over the government, report this and move on to a new story after almost half a day has elapsed. What's the other side of this story again?
I racked my brain for a few minutes. I literally can't think of any action of this government that has made us safer in the last 10 years. Any small, solitary acts were compromised by overreach, and this includes the murder of Osama bin Laden, which only proved to the world that we'll lie through our teeth about even the most meaningless detail when it comes to propaganda, and that we don't respect international law or the autonomy of other governments, which is exactly the reason they hate us and attacked us to begin with. The sad-- but profitable-- cycle continues...
I'm not going to sugarcoat my position, or give you some sort of trivial list to justify your idea of "intelligence" when it's really designed only to make you sleep better at night when you know that we're complicit in the crimes of our leaders when we refuse to hold them accountable for even acts of evil. That's for you, and all Americans, to deal with on our own.
Here's a pair of actual opposing thoughts for you to hold in your head at one time: More than three thousand innocent people in this country-- parents, children, grandchildren, siblings, friends-- paid the ultimate price on September 11th, 2001, a price far exceeding what they had any right to pay, because of the evil actions of their government, their country, and by extension, themselves. The deaths of these men and women were completely unjustified and immoral-- and yet, as a nation, we had it coming. That's what that quote means.
We had it coming!! Why? Because we let our women walk around with their faces unveiled. Because we allow people to practice whatever religion they want without the threat of honor killing by their parents' church friends. Or maybe its because we allow anyone who works hard the chance to get rich, even if they aren't related to anyone in government.
Our corrupt government steals the resources of other countries? The last time I checked, the government does not do any drilling for oil or mining of gold (if they did, we wouldn't be in a fiscal deficit). Private companies (many of which are non-US) strike deals with landowners and foreign governments to PAY to remove the natural resources. If the foreign governments' don't think they're getting a fair deal, more times than not they will just cancel the old contract and make the company negotiate a new one. Or they will just say "Thanks for investing billions of dollars in this oil production system - we'll just take that off your hands now" (see Venezuela).
The US rapes and destroys other cultures? I can't even imagine how the US would do that. We have never taken over a country. Any war we have fought on foreign soil eventually ended with the US going back home (I doubt the troops stationed at leftover bases in Germany, Japan, etc. are destroying the culture). More likely is the foreign people see the freedom and prosperity of the US and change their own culture to emulate that. Every culture evolves and strives for something better. Otherwise we would all be tending to our 1.5 acres of land by hand and crapping in a hole 50 feet from the poorly constructed log cabin we would live in.
Is our government corrupt? Sure. So is every other government in the world. What's your point? To suggest we invited murder upon ourselves because we promote an economic and ideological system that was different than the terrorists is again, stupid.
We took over THIS country.
Those were Europeans who took over this country. Not the US. But I did try to exclude the American Indians by saying wars on foreign soil.
I can say that I don't feel safer. Being it the Midwest I didn't feel the brunt of the attack like others did. I wasn't covered in dust and no one that I knew died in the attack. Maybe someone who was part of it feels safer, I do not.
I'm not going to spout who killed who and how many died in what wars because the US is one of the biggest bullies in history and every once in a while, the bully gets smacked in the face. We might not see what we do as terrorism, but take our actions and place them in another country with another leader and we deem them terrorists. Threats to our way of life.
I can tell you this, I don't like color schemes being tossed at me to make me scared. How does an alert level of Red make me feel safe? It's not designed to make me feel safe. It's designed to scare the shit out of people and that's exactly what it does.
We have no right to privacy and any right we have can be immediately taken away from us for any reason the government see's fit and no one will hear you scream from Gitmo.
Since 9/11 we have turned our country into an airport. Honestly, I don't like the airport.
I don't know if I can say we've raped a country, but we tore up Vietnam. Sure we came home, after 1-3 million people had died and for what cause? For us to contain a problem we thought would be heading our way.
I will add I'm glad that we didn't have to get into the Native American discussion. Seems pointless to even go there.
Another great, well thought, intelligent submission Chris.
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