Friday, September 9, 2011 by the Inter Press Service
9/11: Al Qaeda's Project for Ending the American Century Succeeded
by Jim Lobe
Friday, September 9, 2011 by CommonDreams.org
Imperial Delusions: Ignoring the Lessons of 9/11
by Robert Jensen
Saturday, September 10, 2011 by CommonDreams.org
The Legacy of 9/11: An Institutionalization of Terror at Home and Abroad
by Chip Pitts
Sunday, September 11, 2011 by CommonDreams.org
Millennial Math: 9+11=1984
by Randall Amster
Sunday, September 11, 2011 by CommonDreams.org
Endless War, Lies and Terror: The Decade Since 9/11
by Mark Weisbrot
Sunday, September 11, 2011 by the Independent/UK
Al-Qa'ida, and the Myth Behind the War on Terrorism
The atrocities against America created the image of Osama bin Laden as the leader of a global jihad upon the West. It was a fantasy that governments willingly, and disastrously, helped to perpetuate
by Patrick Cockburn
Sunday, September 11, 2011 by TruthDig
A Decade After 9/11: We Are What We Loathe
by Chris Hedges
9/11: Al Qaeda's Project for Ending the American Century Succeeded
by Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - A decade after its spectacular Sept. 11, 2001
attacks on New York City's twin World Trade Center towers and the
Pentagon and despite the killing earlier this year of its charismatic
leader, Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda appears to have largely succeeded in
its hopes of accelerating the decline of U.S. global power, if not
bringing it to the brink of collapse.
Since 9/11, the United States' global standing has plunged dramatically -- a decline largely fueled by its alienating and costly "war on terror". (A. Golden/eyewash design) That appears to be the strong consensus of the foreign-policy elite which, with only a few exceptions, believes that the administration of President George W. Bush badly "over-reacted" to the attacks and that that over-reaction continues to this day.
That over-reaction was driven in major part by a close-knit group of neo-conservatives and other hawks who seized control of Bush's foreign policy even before the dust had settled over Lower Manhattan and set it on a radical course designed to consolidate Washington's dominance of the Greater Middle East and "shock and awe" any aspiring global or regional rival powers into acquiescing to a "unipolar" world.
Led within the administration by Vice President Dick Cheney, Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld and their mostly neo-conservative aides and supporters, the hawks had four years before joined the Project for the New American Century (PNAC). The letter-head organization was co- founded by neo-conservative ideologues William Kristol and Robert Kagan, who, in an important 1996 article, called for the U.S. to preserve its post-Cold War "hegemony as far into the future as possible."
In a series of subsequent letters and publications, they urged ever more military spending; pre-emptive, and if necessary, unilateral military action against possible threats; and "regime change" for rogue states, beginning with Iraq's Saddam Hussein.
On the eve of 9/11, PNAC's notion that Washington could extend its "benevolent global hegemony" indefinitely did not appear unreasonable. With more than 30 percent of the global economy, the strongest fiscal position in a generation, and a defence budget greater than the 20 next-most-powerful militaries combined, Washington looked unchallengeable, a perception soon enhanced by the show of national unity that followed the attacks and the speed and apparent ease with which Washington orchestrated the defeat of the Taliban in Afghanistan later that year.
"I've gone back in world history and never seen anything like it," exclaimed Yale University historian Paul Kennedy, a leading exponent of the "declinist" school of U.S. power 15 years before, about Washington's dominance, which he compared favorably to the British Empire in its day.
PNAC's associates were similarly impressed. "People are now coming out of the closet on the word 'empire'," exulted the Washington Post's neo-conservative columnist, Charles Krauthammer, a Cheney favorite and long-time advocate of a U.S.-led "unipolar" world. "The fact is no country has been as dominant culturally, economically, technologically, and militarily in the history of the world since the Roman Empire."
Such exuberance (or hubris) naturally fueled the next phase in PNAC's quest – originally laid out in an open letter to Bush published by the group just nine days after 9/11 – for victory in what was now called the "global war on terror": regime change in Iraq.
"Failure to undertake such an effort will constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender in the war on international terrorism," PNAC had warned, arguing that Washington must expand its target list to include states -- particularly those hostile to Israel -- that support terrorist groups, as well as the terrorist groups themselves.
So, instead of focusing on capturing bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders and providing the kind of security and material assistance needed to pacify and begin rebuilding Afghanistan, Bush turned his attention -- and diverted U.S. military and intelligence resources -- to preparing for war against Iraq.
That decision is now seen universally -- with the exception of Cheney and his die-hard PNAC supporters -- as perhaps the single-most disastrous foreign policy decision by a U.S. president in the past decade, if not the past century.
Not only did it effectively set the stage for an eventual Taliban comeback in Afghanistan (which is now costing the U.S. some 10 billion dollars a month), but it also destroyed the international support and solidarity Washington had enjoyed immediately after the 9/11 attacks -- a fact made excruciatingly clear by Bush's failure to gain U.N. Security Council backing for his invasion of Iraq in March 2003. It also helped persuade tens of millions of Muslims that the U.S. was waging war on Islam, according to dozens of public-opinion surveys.
Indeed, by invading Iraq, the U.S. fell into a trap set by bin Laden who, convinced that Moscow's decade-long occupation of Afghanistan contributed critically to the Soviet Union's eventual collapse, clearly believed that the U.S. was susceptible to the same kind of over-extension.
"We, alongside the mujahedeen, bled Russia for 10 years until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat," he said in a 2004 video-tape describing what he called a "war of attrition."
"We are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy," he added. "All that we have to do is to send two mujahedeen to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written 'Al Qaeda', in order to make generals race there and to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses without their achieving anything of note other than some benefits for their private corporations," he went on.
Of course, by the time bin Laden recorded those remarks, the U.S. forces in Iraq were battling a growing insurgency, one that not only would result in hugely costly abuses by U.S. forces at Abu Ghraib that inflicted serious damage to Washington's already-tattered moral image, but that would also push Iraq to the very brink of civil war and lead to an even deeper and more expensive intervention by the U.S. military.
True to bin Laden's prediction, Washington, goaded by PNAC associates and alumni, also deployed forces -- or drone missiles at the very least -- to virtually wherever Al Qaeda or its alleged affiliates raised its flag, often at the cost of weakening local governments and incurring the wrath of local populations, particularly in Somalia and Yemen.
More importantly, the same held true in nuclear-armed Pakistan, not to mention Afghanistan, where Bush's successor, Barack Obama, more than doubled U.S. troop strength to 100,000 in his first two years in office, even as he withdrew an equivalent number from Iraq.
The costs have been staggering in almost every respect. The estimated three to 4.4 trillion dollars Washington has incurred either directly or indirectly in conducting the "global war on terror" account for a substantial portion of the fiscal crisis that transformed the country's politics and brought it to the edge of bankruptcy last month.
And while the U.S. military remains by far the strongest in the world, its veil of invincibility has been irreparably pierced by the success with which rag-tag groups of guerrillas have defied and frustrated it. The result, according to conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, has been "a steady erosion of America's position in the world," which Obama has so far been unable to reverse.
And leading the charge were precisely those hawks whose fondest wish
was to extend, rather than cut short, Washington's global hegemony.
Since 9/11, the United States' global standing has plunged dramatically -- a decline largely fueled by its alienating and costly "war on terror". (A. Golden/eyewash design) That appears to be the strong consensus of the foreign-policy elite which, with only a few exceptions, believes that the administration of President George W. Bush badly "over-reacted" to the attacks and that that over-reaction continues to this day.
That over-reaction was driven in major part by a close-knit group of neo-conservatives and other hawks who seized control of Bush's foreign policy even before the dust had settled over Lower Manhattan and set it on a radical course designed to consolidate Washington's dominance of the Greater Middle East and "shock and awe" any aspiring global or regional rival powers into acquiescing to a "unipolar" world.
Led within the administration by Vice President Dick Cheney, Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld and their mostly neo-conservative aides and supporters, the hawks had four years before joined the Project for the New American Century (PNAC). The letter-head organization was co- founded by neo-conservative ideologues William Kristol and Robert Kagan, who, in an important 1996 article, called for the U.S. to preserve its post-Cold War "hegemony as far into the future as possible."
In a series of subsequent letters and publications, they urged ever more military spending; pre-emptive, and if necessary, unilateral military action against possible threats; and "regime change" for rogue states, beginning with Iraq's Saddam Hussein.
On the eve of 9/11, PNAC's notion that Washington could extend its "benevolent global hegemony" indefinitely did not appear unreasonable. With more than 30 percent of the global economy, the strongest fiscal position in a generation, and a defence budget greater than the 20 next-most-powerful militaries combined, Washington looked unchallengeable, a perception soon enhanced by the show of national unity that followed the attacks and the speed and apparent ease with which Washington orchestrated the defeat of the Taliban in Afghanistan later that year.
"I've gone back in world history and never seen anything like it," exclaimed Yale University historian Paul Kennedy, a leading exponent of the "declinist" school of U.S. power 15 years before, about Washington's dominance, which he compared favorably to the British Empire in its day.
PNAC's associates were similarly impressed. "People are now coming out of the closet on the word 'empire'," exulted the Washington Post's neo-conservative columnist, Charles Krauthammer, a Cheney favorite and long-time advocate of a U.S.-led "unipolar" world. "The fact is no country has been as dominant culturally, economically, technologically, and militarily in the history of the world since the Roman Empire."
Such exuberance (or hubris) naturally fueled the next phase in PNAC's quest – originally laid out in an open letter to Bush published by the group just nine days after 9/11 – for victory in what was now called the "global war on terror": regime change in Iraq.
"Failure to undertake such an effort will constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender in the war on international terrorism," PNAC had warned, arguing that Washington must expand its target list to include states -- particularly those hostile to Israel -- that support terrorist groups, as well as the terrorist groups themselves.
So, instead of focusing on capturing bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders and providing the kind of security and material assistance needed to pacify and begin rebuilding Afghanistan, Bush turned his attention -- and diverted U.S. military and intelligence resources -- to preparing for war against Iraq.
That decision is now seen universally -- with the exception of Cheney and his die-hard PNAC supporters -- as perhaps the single-most disastrous foreign policy decision by a U.S. president in the past decade, if not the past century.
Not only did it effectively set the stage for an eventual Taliban comeback in Afghanistan (which is now costing the U.S. some 10 billion dollars a month), but it also destroyed the international support and solidarity Washington had enjoyed immediately after the 9/11 attacks -- a fact made excruciatingly clear by Bush's failure to gain U.N. Security Council backing for his invasion of Iraq in March 2003. It also helped persuade tens of millions of Muslims that the U.S. was waging war on Islam, according to dozens of public-opinion surveys.
Indeed, by invading Iraq, the U.S. fell into a trap set by bin Laden who, convinced that Moscow's decade-long occupation of Afghanistan contributed critically to the Soviet Union's eventual collapse, clearly believed that the U.S. was susceptible to the same kind of over-extension.
"We, alongside the mujahedeen, bled Russia for 10 years until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat," he said in a 2004 video-tape describing what he called a "war of attrition."
"We are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy," he added. "All that we have to do is to send two mujahedeen to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written 'Al Qaeda', in order to make generals race there and to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses without their achieving anything of note other than some benefits for their private corporations," he went on.
Of course, by the time bin Laden recorded those remarks, the U.S. forces in Iraq were battling a growing insurgency, one that not only would result in hugely costly abuses by U.S. forces at Abu Ghraib that inflicted serious damage to Washington's already-tattered moral image, but that would also push Iraq to the very brink of civil war and lead to an even deeper and more expensive intervention by the U.S. military.
True to bin Laden's prediction, Washington, goaded by PNAC associates and alumni, also deployed forces -- or drone missiles at the very least -- to virtually wherever Al Qaeda or its alleged affiliates raised its flag, often at the cost of weakening local governments and incurring the wrath of local populations, particularly in Somalia and Yemen.
More importantly, the same held true in nuclear-armed Pakistan, not to mention Afghanistan, where Bush's successor, Barack Obama, more than doubled U.S. troop strength to 100,000 in his first two years in office, even as he withdrew an equivalent number from Iraq.
The costs have been staggering in almost every respect. The estimated three to 4.4 trillion dollars Washington has incurred either directly or indirectly in conducting the "global war on terror" account for a substantial portion of the fiscal crisis that transformed the country's politics and brought it to the edge of bankruptcy last month.
And while the U.S. military remains by far the strongest in the world, its veil of invincibility has been irreparably pierced by the success with which rag-tag groups of guerrillas have defied and frustrated it. The result, according to conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, has been "a steady erosion of America's position in the world," which Obama has so far been unable to reverse.
"…(F)or a long time," wrote Richard Clarke, a top national-security official under Bush who warned the White House several months before 9/11 that Al Qaeda was planning a major operation against the U.S. homeland, in the dailybeast.com, "we actually played into the hands of our opponents, doing precisely what they had wanted us to do, responding in the ways that they had sought to provoke, damaging our economy and alienating much of the Middle East."
+++++
Friday, September 9, 2011 by CommonDreams.org
Imperial Delusions: Ignoring the Lessons of 9/11
by Robert Jensen
Ten years ago, critics of America’s mad rush to war were right, but it didn’t matter.
Within hours after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, it was clear that political leaders were going to use the attacks to justify war in Central Asia and the Middle East. And within hours, those of us critical of that policy began to offer principled and practical arguments against aggressive war as a response to the crimes.
It didn’t matter because neither the public nor policymakers were interested in principled or practical arguments. People wanted revenge, and the policymakers seized the opportunity to use U.S. military power. Critical thinking became a mark not of conscientious citizenship but of dangerous disloyalty.
We were right, but the wars came.
The destructive capacity of the U.S. military meant quick “victories” that just as quickly proved illusory. As the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq dragged on, it became clearer that the position staked out by early opponents was correct -- the wars not only were illegal (conforming to neither international nor constitutional law) and immoral (fought in ways that guaranteed large-scale civilian casualties and displacement), but a failure on any pragmatic criteria. The U.S. military has killed some of the people who were targeting the United States and destroyed some of their infrastructure and organization, but a decade later we are weaker and our sense of safety more fragile. The ability to dominate militarily proved to be both inadequate and transitory, as predicted.
Ten years later, we are still right and it still doesn’t matter.
There’s a simple reason for this: Empires rarely learn in time, because power tends to dull people’s capacity for critical self-reflection. While ascending to power, empires believe themselves to be invincible. While declining in power, they cling desperately to old myths of remembered glory.
Today the United States is morally bankrupt and spiritually broken. The problem is not that we have strayed from our founding principles, but that we are still operating on those principles -- delusional notions about manifest destiny, American exceptionalism, the right to take more than our share of the world’s resources by whatever means necessary. As the United States grew in wealth and power, bounty for the chosen came at the cost of misery for the many.
After World War II, as the United States became the dominant power not just in the Americas but on the world stage, the principles didn’t change. U.S. foreign policy sought to deepen and extend U.S. power around the world, especially in the energy-rich and strategically crucial Middle East; always with an eye on derailing any Third World societies’ attempts to pursue a course of independent development outside the U.S. sphere; and containing the possibility of challenges to U.S. dominance from other powerful states.
Does that summary sound like radical hysteria? Recall this statement from President Jimmy Carter’s 1980 State of the Union address: “An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.” Democrats and Republicans, before and after, followed the same policy.
The George W. Bush administration offered a particularly intense ideological fanaticism, but the course charted by the Obama administration is much the same. Consider this 2006 statement by Robert Gates, who served as Secretary of Defense in both administrations:
If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read: Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over.”
Will our autopsy report read “global war on terror”?
That sounds harsh, and it’s tempting to argue that we should refrain from political debate on the 9/11 anniversary to honor those who died and to respect those who lost loved ones. I would be willing to do that if the cheerleaders for the U.S. empire would refrain from using the day to justify the wars of aggression that followed 9/11. But given the events of the past decade, there is no way to take the politics out of the anniversary.
We should take time on 9/11 to remember the nearly 3,000 victims who died that day, but as responsible citizens, we also should face a harsh reality: While the terrorism of fanatical individuals and groups is a serious threat, much greater damage has been done by our nation-state caught up in its own fanatical notions of imperial greatness.
That’s why I feel no satisfaction in being part of the anti-war/anti-empire movement. Being right means nothing if we failed to create a more just foreign policy conducted by a more humble nation.
Ten years later, I feel the same thing that I felt on 9/11 -- an indescribable grief over the senseless death of that day and of days to come.
Within hours after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, it was clear that political leaders were going to use the attacks to justify war in Central Asia and the Middle East. And within hours, those of us critical of that policy began to offer principled and practical arguments against aggressive war as a response to the crimes.
It didn’t matter because neither the public nor policymakers were interested in principled or practical arguments. People wanted revenge, and the policymakers seized the opportunity to use U.S. military power. Critical thinking became a mark not of conscientious citizenship but of dangerous disloyalty.
We were right, but the wars came.
The destructive capacity of the U.S. military meant quick “victories” that just as quickly proved illusory. As the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq dragged on, it became clearer that the position staked out by early opponents was correct -- the wars not only were illegal (conforming to neither international nor constitutional law) and immoral (fought in ways that guaranteed large-scale civilian casualties and displacement), but a failure on any pragmatic criteria. The U.S. military has killed some of the people who were targeting the United States and destroyed some of their infrastructure and organization, but a decade later we are weaker and our sense of safety more fragile. The ability to dominate militarily proved to be both inadequate and transitory, as predicted.
Ten years later, we are still right and it still doesn’t matter.
There’s a simple reason for this: Empires rarely learn in time, because power tends to dull people’s capacity for critical self-reflection. While ascending to power, empires believe themselves to be invincible. While declining in power, they cling desperately to old myths of remembered glory.
Today the United States is morally bankrupt and spiritually broken. The problem is not that we have strayed from our founding principles, but that we are still operating on those principles -- delusional notions about manifest destiny, American exceptionalism, the right to take more than our share of the world’s resources by whatever means necessary. As the United States grew in wealth and power, bounty for the chosen came at the cost of misery for the many.
After World War II, as the United States became the dominant power not just in the Americas but on the world stage, the principles didn’t change. U.S. foreign policy sought to deepen and extend U.S. power around the world, especially in the energy-rich and strategically crucial Middle East; always with an eye on derailing any Third World societies’ attempts to pursue a course of independent development outside the U.S. sphere; and containing the possibility of challenges to U.S. dominance from other powerful states.
Does that summary sound like radical hysteria? Recall this statement from President Jimmy Carter’s 1980 State of the Union address: “An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.” Democrats and Republicans, before and after, followed the same policy.
The George W. Bush administration offered a particularly intense ideological fanaticism, but the course charted by the Obama administration is much the same. Consider this 2006 statement by Robert Gates, who served as Secretary of Defense in both administrations:
“I think the message that we are sending to everyone, not just Iran, is that the United States is an enduring presence in this part of the world. We have been here for a long time. We will be here for a long time and everybody needs to remember that -- both our friends and those who might consider themselves our adversaries.”If the new boss sounds a lot like the old boss, it’s because the problem isn’t just bad leaders but a bad system. That’s why a critique of today’s wars sounds a lot like critiques of wars past. Here’s Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assessment of the imperial war of his time: “[N]o one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war.
If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read: Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over.”
Will our autopsy report read “global war on terror”?
That sounds harsh, and it’s tempting to argue that we should refrain from political debate on the 9/11 anniversary to honor those who died and to respect those who lost loved ones. I would be willing to do that if the cheerleaders for the U.S. empire would refrain from using the day to justify the wars of aggression that followed 9/11. But given the events of the past decade, there is no way to take the politics out of the anniversary.
We should take time on 9/11 to remember the nearly 3,000 victims who died that day, but as responsible citizens, we also should face a harsh reality: While the terrorism of fanatical individuals and groups is a serious threat, much greater damage has been done by our nation-state caught up in its own fanatical notions of imperial greatness.
That’s why I feel no satisfaction in being part of the anti-war/anti-empire movement. Being right means nothing if we failed to create a more just foreign policy conducted by a more humble nation.
Ten years later, I feel the same thing that I felt on 9/11 -- an indescribable grief over the senseless death of that day and of days to come.
++++
Saturday, September 10, 2011 by CommonDreams.org
The Legacy of 9/11: An Institutionalization of Terror at Home and Abroad
by Chip Pitts
Responding to terror perpetrated by 19 men with box-cutters a decade ago, the US government has now put hundreds of millions
of innocent Americans into countless military, intelligence, and law
enforcement databases without suspecting them of any crime. The National
Security Agency eavesdrops on over 1.7 billion pieces of our email, phone, and other communications each day. And the government has spent trillions
of dollars on often worthless “homeland” security bureaucrats and
technologies—not to mention the additional trillions spent on the
various declared and undeclared wars associated with the ongoing “war on
terror.”
In the name of fighting terrorism, the government has institutionalized a massive response based on fear more than anything else. In the name of defending our freedoms, our government has fractured them as thoroughly as the WTC towers and Pentagon. In the name of enhancing security, it has damaged the authentic security and future of the nation.
Propagandistically “selling” the new security institutions and technologies to Americans has served the selfish interests of demagogic politicians, a conflict-loving mainstream media, and the wealthy contractors from the military-industrial-surveillance complex. But this has come at the expense of everyone else in the nation, now and in the future. Terrorists and criminals can easily evade most of these technologies; ordinary citizens won’t.
As carefully documented by Dana Priest and William Arkin in their new book, Top Secret America (based on the Washington Post series of the same name), no one—not even the government itself—has any real idea how much money’s being spent or who’s doing what in these new agencies; and worse, they are so secretive, duplicative, and inefficient that they simply don’t work.
As with the PATRIOT Act itself, mission creep and the rarity of actual terror events means that these new Keystone Cops are increasingly using these awesome new powers and technologies for petty crime (like ensuring that proceeds from neighborhood magazine subscription sales aren’t pocketed) or, worse yet, for active repression of peaceful dissenters, environmental and anti-war activists, animal rights and pro- and anti-abortion rights activists, Tea Party members and libertarians.
The FBI, CIA, the military’s new Northern Command, and the top-secret Joint Special Operational Command, in partnership with local police, corporations, and the 72 duplicative and ineffective “fusion centers,” use the powerful new technologies and surveillance authorities to secretly access our bank records, emails, airline and other travel information. Muslims, immigrants, African Americans, and other ethnic minorities are particular targets. Ironically, again, the military and law enforcement authorities supposedly protecting our freedoms and democracy are jeopardizing those rights and that democracy.
This new us-versus-them, jingoistic militarism has even crept into our politics (just look at debate over drones and troops at the border), TV shows (from 24 to NCIS: Naval Criminal Investigative Service), music (from Lee Greenwood’s “Proud to be an American” to Toby Keith’s “The Angry American”), and movies (from Captain America to Cowboys and Aliens).
Our national character seems to have morphed into national caricature – an extreme, almost cartoon version of characteristics our nation possesses at its worst rather than its best: violence, racism, discrimination, arrogance, stupidity.
Respect for rights is indeed the only source of true security in our nation -- the most diverse in the world – especially in a world that contains both newly empowered diversity and diversified power.
President Obama has compounded the errors of Bush and Cheney by cynically continuing essentially the same flawed approaches. Most egregiously, he has dramatically escalated some of the most morally and legally indefensible and counterproductive techniques, including the global drone attacks now condemned even by Obama’s former Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair, and increased reliance upon extra-judicial killings or assassinations that completely sidestep fair trials and due process by targeting even US citizens.
These may produce some short-term “successes,” but they yield long-term catastrophe as revenge kicks in, those killed are quickly replaced, further offshoots of al Qaeda are created, both non-nuclear nations like Yemen and the Philippines and nuclear nations like Pakistan are destabilized, and, in short, the US creates more terrorists.
What Abraham Lincoln noted about the ironic vulnerability of our freedoms could just as readily be applied to our authentic national security: "America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves."
In the name of fighting terrorism, the government has institutionalized a massive response based on fear more than anything else. In the name of defending our freedoms, our government has fractured them as thoroughly as the WTC towers and Pentagon. In the name of enhancing security, it has damaged the authentic security and future of the nation.
Propagandistically “selling” the new security institutions and technologies to Americans has served the selfish interests of demagogic politicians, a conflict-loving mainstream media, and the wealthy contractors from the military-industrial-surveillance complex. But this has come at the expense of everyone else in the nation, now and in the future. Terrorists and criminals can easily evade most of these technologies; ordinary citizens won’t.
As carefully documented by Dana Priest and William Arkin in their new book, Top Secret America (based on the Washington Post series of the same name), no one—not even the government itself—has any real idea how much money’s being spent or who’s doing what in these new agencies; and worse, they are so secretive, duplicative, and inefficient that they simply don’t work.
As with the PATRIOT Act itself, mission creep and the rarity of actual terror events means that these new Keystone Cops are increasingly using these awesome new powers and technologies for petty crime (like ensuring that proceeds from neighborhood magazine subscription sales aren’t pocketed) or, worse yet, for active repression of peaceful dissenters, environmental and anti-war activists, animal rights and pro- and anti-abortion rights activists, Tea Party members and libertarians.
The FBI, CIA, the military’s new Northern Command, and the top-secret Joint Special Operational Command, in partnership with local police, corporations, and the 72 duplicative and ineffective “fusion centers,” use the powerful new technologies and surveillance authorities to secretly access our bank records, emails, airline and other travel information. Muslims, immigrants, African Americans, and other ethnic minorities are particular targets. Ironically, again, the military and law enforcement authorities supposedly protecting our freedoms and democracy are jeopardizing those rights and that democracy.
This new us-versus-them, jingoistic militarism has even crept into our politics (just look at debate over drones and troops at the border), TV shows (from 24 to NCIS: Naval Criminal Investigative Service), music (from Lee Greenwood’s “Proud to be an American” to Toby Keith’s “The Angry American”), and movies (from Captain America to Cowboys and Aliens).
Our national character seems to have morphed into national caricature – an extreme, almost cartoon version of characteristics our nation possesses at its worst rather than its best: violence, racism, discrimination, arrogance, stupidity.
Respect for rights is indeed the only source of true security in our nation -- the most diverse in the world – especially in a world that contains both newly empowered diversity and diversified power.
President Obama has compounded the errors of Bush and Cheney by cynically continuing essentially the same flawed approaches. Most egregiously, he has dramatically escalated some of the most morally and legally indefensible and counterproductive techniques, including the global drone attacks now condemned even by Obama’s former Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair, and increased reliance upon extra-judicial killings or assassinations that completely sidestep fair trials and due process by targeting even US citizens.
These may produce some short-term “successes,” but they yield long-term catastrophe as revenge kicks in, those killed are quickly replaced, further offshoots of al Qaeda are created, both non-nuclear nations like Yemen and the Philippines and nuclear nations like Pakistan are destabilized, and, in short, the US creates more terrorists.
What Abraham Lincoln noted about the ironic vulnerability of our freedoms could just as readily be applied to our authentic national security: "America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves."
++++
Sunday, September 11, 2011 by CommonDreams.org
Millennial Math: 9+11=1984
by Randall Amster
It’s been a decade since the day that changed everything -- or at
least, the one that finally laid it all bare. Over the years, I’ve tried
to confront it, rewrite it, debunk it, historicize it, mock it, and
ultimately ignore it, all to no avail. It’s not going anywhere, this
Trojan Horse of the new millennium, this farce that launched a thousand
ships. We’re stuck with it, even though no matter how we crunch the
numbers it still doesn’t really add up. Or does it?
As it turned out, homeland insecurity was the perfect foil for the hegemony of Homeland Security. Now the architects of Total Information Awareness can legally be in our phone calls, our emails, our bank accounts, our library cards, our internet browsers, our peace groups, our medical records, our gonads, our heads, and our hearts. We’ve been hornswoggled, hoodwinked, and hijacked into accepting pervasive incursions into every vestige of individual liberty and political democracy -- all done quite ingeniously in the name of protecting liberty and preserving democracy.
The mathematics are Machiavellian and their logic is inescapable. For the mere price of 3000 souls, the return on investment has been exponential: tens of thousands tortured, hundreds of thousands killed, millions relentlessly survived, billions frightened lest they be next. It is the dream of real numbers, the holy grail of realpolitik, a down payment on the permanent war economy, a blank check for purchasing the dreams of future generations. It is, in short, the emperor’s handcrafted new clothes in full regalia.
Surely this design was carefully vetted before the course was locked in and the data disseminated. Someone clearly calculated the risks and rewards, deciding that vulnerability and invincibility could not only coexist but were necessarily conjoined. The technicians of empire crassly concluded that, in the final analysis, our grief would be exactly the thing to be turned into a constant cry for war.
George W. Bush will never be remembered for his brainpower, although in retrospect he may actually have been a lot smarter than he appeared. In fact, he helped to invent a whole new system of millennial math in which you start with a surplus, then subtract a trillion or so for bailouts and another trillion or two for war, add in a few million lost jobs, and then claim to be a uniter while actually dividing up the spoils -- yielding a sub-prime figure that represents the difference between real and imaginary numbers.
Perhaps the most impressive feat, of course, was turning the tragedy of 9/11 into a permanent Orwellian architecture of repression and surveillance. Yes, theories still abound about the true origins of this seminal episode in American history, just as some misguided revisionists have concocted confabulations around similar “trigger events” like the Alamo, the Maine, Pearl Harbor, the Gulf of Tonkin, WMD, and more. Suggesting that any or all of these could have involved massive cover-ups or gross political distortions flies in the face of common sense and good manners alike. Plus it can give you a serious headache.
No, it’s much better to accept the official conspiracy theory rather than the unofficial ones skulking around the web. So what if a 2004 Zogby poll found that half of New York City believed that our leaders had foreknowledge of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, yet “consciously failed to act.” Does it really make a damn bit of difference that a 2006 Scripps Howard poll concluded that a third of all Americans suspected that 9/11 was “an inside job” by our own government? Are we supposed to start trusting Americans to know what’s going on in the world? I think not.
We need to use Occam’s Razor in situations like this, which simply states: “Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily.” In other words, we should find the simplest explanation for events and not add greater complexity through needless extrapolation. Americans may love a good conspiracy tale, but in this case the facts don’t lie: we were attacked on a day whose numbers mean “emergency” by fundamentalist militants intent on destroying our economy, undermining our values and principles, and causing us to untenably extend our military forces in a misguided response to their terrorist aggression.
Luckily, we saw right through this sinister plot and prevented all of this from happening. Okay, so the economy has tanked. Sure, we’ve shredded the Constitution and ushered in a complete surveillance state. Fine, the quagmire in Iraq has been framed on both ends by a quagmire in Afghanistan. But we are going to win this thing and defeat evil in the end! We’re Americans, dammit, and even if a whole bunch of us stupidly believe that our own government blew up our own buildings and killed our own people -- by god, we are still going to kick some ass and show the world what we’re made of. False flag or not, the stars and stripes will forever fly wherever freedom rings, even if it’s getting harder to hear its peal.
So to all of you conspiratorial holdouts, so-called “truthers,” nutty New Yorkers, paranoiac physicists, screwball stock-optioners, cerebrally-challenged celebrities, and the rest of you 100 million or so wingnuts, let me just say that it’s time to wake up, grow up, and move on.
Stop playing X-Files with this stuff and start playing X-Box instead. The truth isn’t out there -- it’s right in front of your face, and it will set you free. Whatever you think you see is illusory; the tides of history are by now all water under the bridge; the cold hard facts are undeniable even as you fumble for the still-warm “smoking gun.”
Drone strikes, smart bombs, airport scans, renditions, Abu Ghraibs, Guatanamos -- all wrapped in reams of red, white, and blue bunting -- are truer than your “truths.” As Orwell himself once said: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stomping on a human face -- forever.” Or, like the bumper sticker casually confirms, “It’s God’s job to judge the terrorists; it’s the Marine’s job to arrange the meeting.” History will vindicate our resolve, the terrorists will be completely eradicated, and the next decade will finally show the world that no one can bring down the United States except ourselves, by golly.
To sum up on this auspicious anniversary, it comes down to the sheer force of numbers. All these years we were taught that nine plus eleven equals twenty, but that was a lie … it adds up to 1984. I know this now. Victory at last! And in the end, I really do love the new millennial math after all.
As it turned out, homeland insecurity was the perfect foil for the hegemony of Homeland Security. Now the architects of Total Information Awareness can legally be in our phone calls, our emails, our bank accounts, our library cards, our internet browsers, our peace groups, our medical records, our gonads, our heads, and our hearts. We’ve been hornswoggled, hoodwinked, and hijacked into accepting pervasive incursions into every vestige of individual liberty and political democracy -- all done quite ingeniously in the name of protecting liberty and preserving democracy.
The mathematics are Machiavellian and their logic is inescapable. For the mere price of 3000 souls, the return on investment has been exponential: tens of thousands tortured, hundreds of thousands killed, millions relentlessly survived, billions frightened lest they be next. It is the dream of real numbers, the holy grail of realpolitik, a down payment on the permanent war economy, a blank check for purchasing the dreams of future generations. It is, in short, the emperor’s handcrafted new clothes in full regalia.
Surely this design was carefully vetted before the course was locked in and the data disseminated. Someone clearly calculated the risks and rewards, deciding that vulnerability and invincibility could not only coexist but were necessarily conjoined. The technicians of empire crassly concluded that, in the final analysis, our grief would be exactly the thing to be turned into a constant cry for war.
George W. Bush will never be remembered for his brainpower, although in retrospect he may actually have been a lot smarter than he appeared. In fact, he helped to invent a whole new system of millennial math in which you start with a surplus, then subtract a trillion or so for bailouts and another trillion or two for war, add in a few million lost jobs, and then claim to be a uniter while actually dividing up the spoils -- yielding a sub-prime figure that represents the difference between real and imaginary numbers.
Perhaps the most impressive feat, of course, was turning the tragedy of 9/11 into a permanent Orwellian architecture of repression and surveillance. Yes, theories still abound about the true origins of this seminal episode in American history, just as some misguided revisionists have concocted confabulations around similar “trigger events” like the Alamo, the Maine, Pearl Harbor, the Gulf of Tonkin, WMD, and more. Suggesting that any or all of these could have involved massive cover-ups or gross political distortions flies in the face of common sense and good manners alike. Plus it can give you a serious headache.
No, it’s much better to accept the official conspiracy theory rather than the unofficial ones skulking around the web. So what if a 2004 Zogby poll found that half of New York City believed that our leaders had foreknowledge of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, yet “consciously failed to act.” Does it really make a damn bit of difference that a 2006 Scripps Howard poll concluded that a third of all Americans suspected that 9/11 was “an inside job” by our own government? Are we supposed to start trusting Americans to know what’s going on in the world? I think not.
We need to use Occam’s Razor in situations like this, which simply states: “Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily.” In other words, we should find the simplest explanation for events and not add greater complexity through needless extrapolation. Americans may love a good conspiracy tale, but in this case the facts don’t lie: we were attacked on a day whose numbers mean “emergency” by fundamentalist militants intent on destroying our economy, undermining our values and principles, and causing us to untenably extend our military forces in a misguided response to their terrorist aggression.
Luckily, we saw right through this sinister plot and prevented all of this from happening. Okay, so the economy has tanked. Sure, we’ve shredded the Constitution and ushered in a complete surveillance state. Fine, the quagmire in Iraq has been framed on both ends by a quagmire in Afghanistan. But we are going to win this thing and defeat evil in the end! We’re Americans, dammit, and even if a whole bunch of us stupidly believe that our own government blew up our own buildings and killed our own people -- by god, we are still going to kick some ass and show the world what we’re made of. False flag or not, the stars and stripes will forever fly wherever freedom rings, even if it’s getting harder to hear its peal.
So to all of you conspiratorial holdouts, so-called “truthers,” nutty New Yorkers, paranoiac physicists, screwball stock-optioners, cerebrally-challenged celebrities, and the rest of you 100 million or so wingnuts, let me just say that it’s time to wake up, grow up, and move on.
Stop playing X-Files with this stuff and start playing X-Box instead. The truth isn’t out there -- it’s right in front of your face, and it will set you free. Whatever you think you see is illusory; the tides of history are by now all water under the bridge; the cold hard facts are undeniable even as you fumble for the still-warm “smoking gun.”
Drone strikes, smart bombs, airport scans, renditions, Abu Ghraibs, Guatanamos -- all wrapped in reams of red, white, and blue bunting -- are truer than your “truths.” As Orwell himself once said: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stomping on a human face -- forever.” Or, like the bumper sticker casually confirms, “It’s God’s job to judge the terrorists; it’s the Marine’s job to arrange the meeting.” History will vindicate our resolve, the terrorists will be completely eradicated, and the next decade will finally show the world that no one can bring down the United States except ourselves, by golly.
To sum up on this auspicious anniversary, it comes down to the sheer force of numbers. All these years we were taught that nine plus eleven equals twenty, but that was a lie … it adds up to 1984. I know this now. Victory at last! And in the end, I really do love the new millennial math after all.
+++++
Sunday, September 11, 2011 by CommonDreams.org
Endless War, Lies and Terror: The Decade Since 9/11
by Mark Weisbrot
"We support your war of terror," proclaims Borat to a cheering
crowd of Americans in a stadium, in the popular Sacha Baron Cohen film.
The crowd apparently thinks he got the preposition wrong, but what makes
the line darkly humorous is that he didn't.
Most of the victims of America's wars that are supposedly "against terror" have been civilians, and torture has also been deployed as a weapon. Civilians in Pakistan are killed on average every week in drone strikes, according to a recent report from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, and also regularly in Afghanistan in "night raids."
And sometimes they are just shot point blank, as in March 2006 when US soldiers reportedly executed at least 10 civilians, including a 70-year old woman and a 5-month old baby, and then called in an airstrike to bomb the house and cover it up. Arecently discovered US diplomatic cable from Wikileaks provides evidence of this crime. Iraq veteranEthan McCord says that killings of civilians by US forces was "standard operating procedure" while he was deployed there.
I grew up during the Cold War, and my elementary school teachers told me that the difference between us and the Communists was that they thought the end justifies the means, but we didn't. It wasn't true then, of course – American armed forces in Vietnam bombed villages, slaughtered civilians, and threw people out of helicopters. But at least our leaders had to pretend that they had some moral superiority to their enemies.
Now we have seen torture and assassination institutionalized and justified at the highest levels. New crimes are continually uncovered: Documents recentlycaptured by Libyan rebels indicate that Washington was sending prisoners to Gadaffi's government for interrogation, i.e. torture.
So that is one of the casualties of 9-11, in addition to the 3000 people brutally murdered on that fateful day in 2001: a moral degeneration among our political leaders who, it must be acknowledged, were already at a low level when it came to respect for human life in the rest of the world. But the world should know that the views presented by our major media and politicians do not necessarily reflect the consent of the governed. In arecent poll conducted by the Pew Research Center , the public was evenly divided on the question of whether the 9/11 attacks may have been the result of our foreign policy.
This is especially impressive because it means that nearly half the country came up with this idea on their own, as it has been scrupulously avoided in ten years of media blather about "how 9/11 changed the world." If we had anything approaching a reality-based media, that number would probably be upwards of eighty per cent. Only a quarter of those surveyed by Pew thought that the wars had made Americans safer; the majority thought the wars increased the chance of terrorist attacks or made no difference.
According to recent polls, a majority of Americans think that the US should not be fighting in Afghanistan; a majority thinks that the US should withdraw its troops as soon as possible, and two-thirds say the threat of terrorism will stay the same when the US withdraws its troops.
Winds of change
The most important way that 9/11 changed the world, as tens of millions of Americans understand, is that it provided an over-arching theme and a rationale for the kinds of military adventures, invasions, bombings, interventions and atrocities that our government had previously carried out under other pretexts. For half a century the "war against Communism" served this purpose.
It didn't matter that governments overthrown in Iran, Chile, Guatemala or elsewhere had no connection to the Soviet Union; or that the Vietnamese were fighting for their own independence. It was an excuse, with a whole world view that shaped the country's most important institutions, and it provided a justification for empire.
Then came that awkward decade after the Berlin wall fell and Washington had to rely on ad hoc excuses, as in the invasion of Panama or the first Iraq War. People like Vice President Dick Cheneyknew immediately after the towers went down that this was not just a tragedy but an opportunity that would serve their interests for years to come, beginning with the unnecessary wars and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq.
But it was the more liberal "enablers," especially in the media, that made everything possible. Bill Keller was executive editor of the New York Times until returning to writing for the paper this month. In the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, the paper printed such journalistic gems as theinfamous "aluminum tubes" report - fake evidence of an Iraqi nuclear program - and other stories that, as the newspaper's ownpublic editor would write, "pushed Pentagon assertions so aggressively you could almost sense epaulets sprouting on the shoulders of editors." Kellerreminisces this week about "the I-Can't-Believe-I'm-a-Hawk Club, made up of liberals for whom 9/11 had stirred a fresh willingness to employ American might."
"It was a large and estimable group of writers and affiliations," he writes, "including, among others, Thomas Friedman of The Times; Fareed Zakaria, of Newsweek; George Packer and Jeffrey Goldberg of The New Yorker; Richard Cohen of The Washington Post; the blogger Andrew Sullivan; Paul Berman of Dissent; Christopher Hitchens of just about everywhere; and Kenneth Pollack [now at the Brookings Institution]."
Keller poses the question: "[K]nowing what we knew then, were we wrong to support the [Iraq] war?" After reviewing the costs of the war, in money and lives [he says "at least 100,000 Iraqis" were killed but the best estimates are closer to a million], he concludes that "Operation Iraqi Freedom was a monumental blunder." But "Whether it was wrong to support the invasion at the time is a harder call."
It's not a hard call for most of America, or the world for that matter. Keller is asking the wrong question. The more important question is how the executive editor of the New York Times can be so confused between right and wrong, when tens of millions of Americans, including many intelligent children, can see right through the crap that we are bombarded with every day.
I'm only picking on the Times because it represents the liberal wing of our establishment media. Most of the rest is much worse. This is one of the great structural problems that must be confronted every day by Americans who would like their country to become a civilized member of the community of nations.
The military-industrial-complex is of course another enormous obstacle. General James L. Jones, Obama's National Security Advisor, explained to journalist and author Bob Woodward, in his book Obama's Wars, why "the United States could not lose the war [in Afghanistan] or be seen as losing the war."
"'If we're not successful here', Jones said, "you'll have a staging base for global terrorism all over the world. People will say the terrorists won. And you'll see expressions of these kinds of things in Africa, South America, you name it. Any developing country is going to say, this is the way we beat [the United States], and we're going to have a bigger problem.' "
Before he took the job as Obama's National Security Advisor, Jones was hauling down $2m a year, paid for serving on the boards of corporations, lobby groups, and military contractors including Boeing and Exxon-Mobil. This is a form of corruption more costly to the United States than anything that our elites regularly denounce in Afghanistan, Iraq, or Pakistan.
If all this sounds pessimistic, with President Obama having escalated the war in Afghanistan, and mostly continuing the foreign policy of George W. Bush's second term, things are not nearly as hopeless as they may seem. First, some of what we are seeing is not structural, but situational. The United States is facing its worst economic failure since the Great Depression. This has drawn attention away from our wars, and given the foreign policy establishment more leeway than they normally would have to proceed without regard to public opinion.
President Obama decided early on that he was not going to expend or risk any political capital trying to change US foreign policy, since his re-election would depend on domestic issues. And many other political actors have made similar decisions, not always for purely opportunistic reasons.
Second, the fact that Obama, a perceived liberal and the country's first African-American president, is in the White House, has kept protest to a minimum. If a Republican president were doing the same things, there would be people in the streets and a lot more of the kind of grass-roots organizing that we saw in Wisconsin. And Washington would be paying a bigger political price in the rest of the world for its crimes, as it did when George W. Bush was president.
Nonetheless, the peace movement remains quite strong and is exerting pressure every day in ways that generally go unreported. This summer, 96 per cent of Democrats in the US House of Representatives went against their president and voted to establish a timetable for withdrawal from Afghanistan. This was a result of the organized efforts of the peace movement.
Americans will end these wars and change the foreign policy that got us into them, the same way we got out of Vietnam or cut off congressional funding to right-wing terrorists in Nicaragua in the 1980s: through persistent organizing, educational work, and pressure on their government – especially the Congress. That is how we will eventually become a republic, as most Americans want, instead of an empire.
Most of the victims of America's wars that are supposedly "against terror" have been civilians, and torture has also been deployed as a weapon. Civilians in Pakistan are killed on average every week in drone strikes, according to a recent report from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, and also regularly in Afghanistan in "night raids."
And sometimes they are just shot point blank, as in March 2006 when US soldiers reportedly executed at least 10 civilians, including a 70-year old woman and a 5-month old baby, and then called in an airstrike to bomb the house and cover it up. Arecently discovered US diplomatic cable from Wikileaks provides evidence of this crime. Iraq veteranEthan McCord says that killings of civilians by US forces was "standard operating procedure" while he was deployed there.
I grew up during the Cold War, and my elementary school teachers told me that the difference between us and the Communists was that they thought the end justifies the means, but we didn't. It wasn't true then, of course – American armed forces in Vietnam bombed villages, slaughtered civilians, and threw people out of helicopters. But at least our leaders had to pretend that they had some moral superiority to their enemies.
Now we have seen torture and assassination institutionalized and justified at the highest levels. New crimes are continually uncovered: Documents recentlycaptured by Libyan rebels indicate that Washington was sending prisoners to Gadaffi's government for interrogation, i.e. torture.
So that is one of the casualties of 9-11, in addition to the 3000 people brutally murdered on that fateful day in 2001: a moral degeneration among our political leaders who, it must be acknowledged, were already at a low level when it came to respect for human life in the rest of the world. But the world should know that the views presented by our major media and politicians do not necessarily reflect the consent of the governed. In arecent poll conducted by the Pew Research Center , the public was evenly divided on the question of whether the 9/11 attacks may have been the result of our foreign policy.
This is especially impressive because it means that nearly half the country came up with this idea on their own, as it has been scrupulously avoided in ten years of media blather about "how 9/11 changed the world." If we had anything approaching a reality-based media, that number would probably be upwards of eighty per cent. Only a quarter of those surveyed by Pew thought that the wars had made Americans safer; the majority thought the wars increased the chance of terrorist attacks or made no difference.
According to recent polls, a majority of Americans think that the US should not be fighting in Afghanistan; a majority thinks that the US should withdraw its troops as soon as possible, and two-thirds say the threat of terrorism will stay the same when the US withdraws its troops.
Winds of change
The most important way that 9/11 changed the world, as tens of millions of Americans understand, is that it provided an over-arching theme and a rationale for the kinds of military adventures, invasions, bombings, interventions and atrocities that our government had previously carried out under other pretexts. For half a century the "war against Communism" served this purpose.
It didn't matter that governments overthrown in Iran, Chile, Guatemala or elsewhere had no connection to the Soviet Union; or that the Vietnamese were fighting for their own independence. It was an excuse, with a whole world view that shaped the country's most important institutions, and it provided a justification for empire.
Then came that awkward decade after the Berlin wall fell and Washington had to rely on ad hoc excuses, as in the invasion of Panama or the first Iraq War. People like Vice President Dick Cheneyknew immediately after the towers went down that this was not just a tragedy but an opportunity that would serve their interests for years to come, beginning with the unnecessary wars and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq.
But it was the more liberal "enablers," especially in the media, that made everything possible. Bill Keller was executive editor of the New York Times until returning to writing for the paper this month. In the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, the paper printed such journalistic gems as theinfamous "aluminum tubes" report - fake evidence of an Iraqi nuclear program - and other stories that, as the newspaper's ownpublic editor would write, "pushed Pentagon assertions so aggressively you could almost sense epaulets sprouting on the shoulders of editors." Kellerreminisces this week about "the I-Can't-Believe-I'm-a-Hawk Club, made up of liberals for whom 9/11 had stirred a fresh willingness to employ American might."
"It was a large and estimable group of writers and affiliations," he writes, "including, among others, Thomas Friedman of The Times; Fareed Zakaria, of Newsweek; George Packer and Jeffrey Goldberg of The New Yorker; Richard Cohen of The Washington Post; the blogger Andrew Sullivan; Paul Berman of Dissent; Christopher Hitchens of just about everywhere; and Kenneth Pollack [now at the Brookings Institution]."
Keller poses the question: "[K]nowing what we knew then, were we wrong to support the [Iraq] war?" After reviewing the costs of the war, in money and lives [he says "at least 100,000 Iraqis" were killed but the best estimates are closer to a million], he concludes that "Operation Iraqi Freedom was a monumental blunder." But "Whether it was wrong to support the invasion at the time is a harder call."
It's not a hard call for most of America, or the world for that matter. Keller is asking the wrong question. The more important question is how the executive editor of the New York Times can be so confused between right and wrong, when tens of millions of Americans, including many intelligent children, can see right through the crap that we are bombarded with every day.
I'm only picking on the Times because it represents the liberal wing of our establishment media. Most of the rest is much worse. This is one of the great structural problems that must be confronted every day by Americans who would like their country to become a civilized member of the community of nations.
The military-industrial-complex is of course another enormous obstacle. General James L. Jones, Obama's National Security Advisor, explained to journalist and author Bob Woodward, in his book Obama's Wars, why "the United States could not lose the war [in Afghanistan] or be seen as losing the war."
"'If we're not successful here', Jones said, "you'll have a staging base for global terrorism all over the world. People will say the terrorists won. And you'll see expressions of these kinds of things in Africa, South America, you name it. Any developing country is going to say, this is the way we beat [the United States], and we're going to have a bigger problem.' "
Before he took the job as Obama's National Security Advisor, Jones was hauling down $2m a year, paid for serving on the boards of corporations, lobby groups, and military contractors including Boeing and Exxon-Mobil. This is a form of corruption more costly to the United States than anything that our elites regularly denounce in Afghanistan, Iraq, or Pakistan.
If all this sounds pessimistic, with President Obama having escalated the war in Afghanistan, and mostly continuing the foreign policy of George W. Bush's second term, things are not nearly as hopeless as they may seem. First, some of what we are seeing is not structural, but situational. The United States is facing its worst economic failure since the Great Depression. This has drawn attention away from our wars, and given the foreign policy establishment more leeway than they normally would have to proceed without regard to public opinion.
President Obama decided early on that he was not going to expend or risk any political capital trying to change US foreign policy, since his re-election would depend on domestic issues. And many other political actors have made similar decisions, not always for purely opportunistic reasons.
Second, the fact that Obama, a perceived liberal and the country's first African-American president, is in the White House, has kept protest to a minimum. If a Republican president were doing the same things, there would be people in the streets and a lot more of the kind of grass-roots organizing that we saw in Wisconsin. And Washington would be paying a bigger political price in the rest of the world for its crimes, as it did when George W. Bush was president.
Nonetheless, the peace movement remains quite strong and is exerting pressure every day in ways that generally go unreported. This summer, 96 per cent of Democrats in the US House of Representatives went against their president and voted to establish a timetable for withdrawal from Afghanistan. This was a result of the organized efforts of the peace movement.
Americans will end these wars and change the foreign policy that got us into them, the same way we got out of Vietnam or cut off congressional funding to right-wing terrorists in Nicaragua in the 1980s: through persistent organizing, educational work, and pressure on their government – especially the Congress. That is how we will eventually become a republic, as most Americans want, instead of an empire.
+++++
Sunday, September 11, 2011 by the Independent/UK
Al-Qa'ida, and the Myth Behind the War on Terrorism
The atrocities against America created the image of Osama bin Laden as the leader of a global jihad upon the West. It was a fantasy that governments willingly, and disastrously, helped to perpetuate
by Patrick Cockburn
What was the most devastating attack by al-Qa'ida in the past few
months? Despite all the pious talk this weekend about combating
"terrorism", few will have heard of it. It happened on August 15th when
bombers killed 63 people in 17 cities up and down Iraq in the space of a
few hours.
Such carnage is ignored because the US and Britain see al-Qa'ida only in relation to themselves, and because all the victims were Iraqis. The real motives of al-Qa'ida, often rooted in local struggles between Palestinians and Israelis or Sunni and Shia, are disregarded and replaced by fantasies about clashing civilizations.
As the arch-exponent of "terrorism", al-Qa'ida is both less and more than the picture of it presented by governments, intelligence agencies, journalists and commentators. As an organization, it has always been small and ramshackle, but, if it appears larger, it is because it has the ability to tap into fierce local disputes. Osama bin Laden may have wanted to launch global jihad, but the majority of those who claimed to be al-Qa'ida since 9/11 have had a different and more immediate agenda.
In Iraq, al-Qa'ida in Mesopotamia, the local franchisee, though never under the control of Bin Laden, was always more interested in butchering Iraqi Shia than in killing American soldiers. The Pakistani Taliban, closely linked to al-Qa'ida, still devotes part of its energies to sending suicide bombers to blow up Shia villagers and city laborers, even when it is facing offensives by the Pakistan army.
Al-Qa'ida's sectarianism is fortunate for the West. Many of the attacks attributed to al-Qa'ida since 9/11 have failed because those carrying them out could not build the simplest explosive device. Why this has happened is something of a mystery since such expertise is all too widespread in areas of al-Qa'ida strength, in central Iraq, north-west Pakistan and even parts of southern Yemen. But the knowledge is not passed on because the bomb-makers in these areas fortunately remain absorbed in seeking to murder their Muslim neighbors and show limited interest in spreading mayhem to Chicago or New York.
Al-Qa'ida as a global organization has always been something of a fiction. Bin Laden may have wanted international reach but, aside from 9/11, seldom achieved it. His propaganda has been accepted as reality by self-interested governments and intelligence agencies with an interest in exaggerating the al-Qa'ida threat to enhance their own authority. Even the most botched and amateur bombing attempt has been portrayed as if it were the Gunpowder Plot revisited. Al-Qa'ida in the Arabian Peninsula commented derisively that it did not matter if its plots failed or succeeded, because even failures disrupted world air traffic and created chaos.
Al-Qa'ida appears to have tentacles all over the world because groups, often with different agendas but using similar tactics, became its franchisees. This notion has also taken hold because autocracies everywhere have an interest in pretending that their opponents are all Islamic fundamentalists, hand-in-glove with al-Qa'ida. In Libya, Muammar Gaddafi did this with great success in his relations with the CIA and MI6, partly because the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group was led by veterans of the Afghan war, such as Abdel Hakim Belhaj. India in Kashmir and Russia in Chechnya, battling what were essentially widely supported separatist movements, could claim to be fearless fighters against Bin Laden and al-Qa'ida.
On 9/11, al-Qa'ida's great success was to publicize its own existence and to spark an American overreaction that played straight into its hands. It provoked the US to overthrow the Taliban and Saddam Hussein and become entrapped in civil wars of great complexity. It has become easy in retrospect to blame George W Bush and his lieutenants in Washington and on the ground for such errors as dissolving the Iraqi army and the Baath party. But at the time – though they have remained very quiet about it since – the Shia and Kurdish leaders were all in favor of eliminating these two main instruments of Sunni power and letting America take the blame.
The Iraq war relaunched al-Qa'ida in another way. From the beginning, US military spokesmen thought it was a smart idea to claim that insurgent attacks, whoever had made them, were the work of al-Qa'ida. The aim was to win support for the war in the US, but in Iraq, where the US occupation was increasingly unpopular, it gave the false impression that al-Qa'ida was leading the guerrilla attacks on the US army. Local children started waving black al-Qa'ida flags at US soldiers. Sunni Arabs thought they might be a useful ally and the movement found it easier to raise money across the Arab world.
Al-Qa'ida has proved so elusive and difficult to eliminate mainly because it has never existed in the form that governments and intelligence agencies pretend. Its membership, even before 2001, was always small and it had to hire local Afghan tribesmen by the day to make propaganda videos. But scarcely a month passes without the CIA announcing that its drones have killed operational planners of al-Qa'ida, as if the group were the mirror image of the Pentagon. Self-declared experts on "terrorism" appear as "talking heads" on television, declaring that the elimination of some al-Qa'ida figure is a body blow to the organization, but, such is its resilience, that the threat to us all remains undiminished.
Could any US government have reacted differently after 9/11? Was not the popular desire for retaliation so strong that Washington could not avoid walking into the al-Qa'ida trap?
There is something in this, but the reason this form of "terrorism" is so effective is that political leaders are tempted to use the opportunity to expand their power by highlighting the threat. They can portray critics who do not go along with this as naive or unpatriotic. Necessary reforms can be dumped amid a general call to rally around the flag.
This overreaction to "terrorist" attacks is not quite inevitable. In Northern Ireland after the start of the troubles in 1968, the Provisional IRA became expert at provoking the British Army and government into overreacting. When a British soldier was killed, the collective punishment of a Roman Catholic district would follow and young men rushed to join the Provisionals. It took a dozen years before the British Army realized that it was reacting as the IRA hoped it would react.
Has the US learned a similar lesson? It looks doubtful because no US president can admit that he has fought unnecessary wars in pursuit of an enemy that barely exists.
Such carnage is ignored because the US and Britain see al-Qa'ida only in relation to themselves, and because all the victims were Iraqis. The real motives of al-Qa'ida, often rooted in local struggles between Palestinians and Israelis or Sunni and Shia, are disregarded and replaced by fantasies about clashing civilizations.
As the arch-exponent of "terrorism", al-Qa'ida is both less and more than the picture of it presented by governments, intelligence agencies, journalists and commentators. As an organization, it has always been small and ramshackle, but, if it appears larger, it is because it has the ability to tap into fierce local disputes. Osama bin Laden may have wanted to launch global jihad, but the majority of those who claimed to be al-Qa'ida since 9/11 have had a different and more immediate agenda.
In Iraq, al-Qa'ida in Mesopotamia, the local franchisee, though never under the control of Bin Laden, was always more interested in butchering Iraqi Shia than in killing American soldiers. The Pakistani Taliban, closely linked to al-Qa'ida, still devotes part of its energies to sending suicide bombers to blow up Shia villagers and city laborers, even when it is facing offensives by the Pakistan army.
Al-Qa'ida's sectarianism is fortunate for the West. Many of the attacks attributed to al-Qa'ida since 9/11 have failed because those carrying them out could not build the simplest explosive device. Why this has happened is something of a mystery since such expertise is all too widespread in areas of al-Qa'ida strength, in central Iraq, north-west Pakistan and even parts of southern Yemen. But the knowledge is not passed on because the bomb-makers in these areas fortunately remain absorbed in seeking to murder their Muslim neighbors and show limited interest in spreading mayhem to Chicago or New York.
Al-Qa'ida as a global organization has always been something of a fiction. Bin Laden may have wanted international reach but, aside from 9/11, seldom achieved it. His propaganda has been accepted as reality by self-interested governments and intelligence agencies with an interest in exaggerating the al-Qa'ida threat to enhance their own authority. Even the most botched and amateur bombing attempt has been portrayed as if it were the Gunpowder Plot revisited. Al-Qa'ida in the Arabian Peninsula commented derisively that it did not matter if its plots failed or succeeded, because even failures disrupted world air traffic and created chaos.
Al-Qa'ida appears to have tentacles all over the world because groups, often with different agendas but using similar tactics, became its franchisees. This notion has also taken hold because autocracies everywhere have an interest in pretending that their opponents are all Islamic fundamentalists, hand-in-glove with al-Qa'ida. In Libya, Muammar Gaddafi did this with great success in his relations with the CIA and MI6, partly because the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group was led by veterans of the Afghan war, such as Abdel Hakim Belhaj. India in Kashmir and Russia in Chechnya, battling what were essentially widely supported separatist movements, could claim to be fearless fighters against Bin Laden and al-Qa'ida.
On 9/11, al-Qa'ida's great success was to publicize its own existence and to spark an American overreaction that played straight into its hands. It provoked the US to overthrow the Taliban and Saddam Hussein and become entrapped in civil wars of great complexity. It has become easy in retrospect to blame George W Bush and his lieutenants in Washington and on the ground for such errors as dissolving the Iraqi army and the Baath party. But at the time – though they have remained very quiet about it since – the Shia and Kurdish leaders were all in favor of eliminating these two main instruments of Sunni power and letting America take the blame.
The Iraq war relaunched al-Qa'ida in another way. From the beginning, US military spokesmen thought it was a smart idea to claim that insurgent attacks, whoever had made them, were the work of al-Qa'ida. The aim was to win support for the war in the US, but in Iraq, where the US occupation was increasingly unpopular, it gave the false impression that al-Qa'ida was leading the guerrilla attacks on the US army. Local children started waving black al-Qa'ida flags at US soldiers. Sunni Arabs thought they might be a useful ally and the movement found it easier to raise money across the Arab world.
Al-Qa'ida has proved so elusive and difficult to eliminate mainly because it has never existed in the form that governments and intelligence agencies pretend. Its membership, even before 2001, was always small and it had to hire local Afghan tribesmen by the day to make propaganda videos. But scarcely a month passes without the CIA announcing that its drones have killed operational planners of al-Qa'ida, as if the group were the mirror image of the Pentagon. Self-declared experts on "terrorism" appear as "talking heads" on television, declaring that the elimination of some al-Qa'ida figure is a body blow to the organization, but, such is its resilience, that the threat to us all remains undiminished.
Could any US government have reacted differently after 9/11? Was not the popular desire for retaliation so strong that Washington could not avoid walking into the al-Qa'ida trap?
There is something in this, but the reason this form of "terrorism" is so effective is that political leaders are tempted to use the opportunity to expand their power by highlighting the threat. They can portray critics who do not go along with this as naive or unpatriotic. Necessary reforms can be dumped amid a general call to rally around the flag.
This overreaction to "terrorist" attacks is not quite inevitable. In Northern Ireland after the start of the troubles in 1968, the Provisional IRA became expert at provoking the British Army and government into overreacting. When a British soldier was killed, the collective punishment of a Roman Catholic district would follow and young men rushed to join the Provisionals. It took a dozen years before the British Army realized that it was reacting as the IRA hoped it would react.
Has the US learned a similar lesson? It looks doubtful because no US president can admit that he has fought unnecessary wars in pursuit of an enemy that barely exists.
++++
Sunday, September 11, 2011 by TruthDig
A Decade After 9/11: We Are What We Loathe
by Chris Hedges
I arrived in Times Square around 9:30 on the morning of Sept. 11,
2001. A large crowd was transfixed by the huge Jumbotron screens.
Billows of smoke could be seen on the screens above us, pouring out of
the two World Trade towers. Two planes, I was told by people in the
crowd, had plowed into the towers. I walked quickly into the New York
Times newsroom at 229 W. 43rd St., grabbed a handful of reporter’s
notebooks, slipped my NYPD press card, which would let me through police
roadblocks, around my neck, and started down the West Side Highway to
the World Trade Center. The highway was closed to traffic. I walked
through knots of emergency workers, police and firemen. Fire trucks,
emergency vehicles, ambulances, police cars and rescue trucks idled on
the asphalt.
The south tower went down around 10 a.m. with a guttural roar. Huge rolling gray clouds of noxious smoke, dust, gas, pulverized concrete, gypsum and the grit of human remains enveloped lower Manhattan. The sun was obscured. The north tower collapsed about 30 minutes later. The dust hung like a shroud over Manhattan.
I headed toward the spot where the towers once stood, passing dazed, ashen and speechless groups of police officers and firefighters. I would pull out a notebook to ask questions and no sounds would come out of their mouths. They forlornly shook their heads and warded me away gently with their hands. By the time I arrived at Ground Zero it was a moonscape; whole floors of the towers had collapsed like an accordion. I pulled out pieces of paper from one floor, and a few feet below were papers from 30 floors away. Small bits of human bodies—a foot in a woman’s shoe, a bit of a leg, part of a torso—lay scattered amid the wreckage.
Scores of people, perhaps more than 200, pushed through the smoke and heat to jump to their deaths from windows that had broken or they had smashed. Sometimes they did this alone, sometimes in pairs. But it seems they took turns, one body cascading downward followed by another. The last acts of individuality. They fell for about 10 seconds, many flailing or replicating the motion of swimmers, reaching 150 miles an hour. Their clothes and, in a few cases, their improvised parachutes made from drapes or tablecloths shredded. They smashed into the pavement with unnerving, sickening thuds. Thump. Thump. Thump. Those who witnessed it were particularly shaken by the sounds the bodies made on impact.
The images of the “jumpers” proved too gruesome for the TV networks. Even before the towers collapsed, the falling men and women were censored from live broadcasts. Isolated pictures appeared the next day in papers, including The New York Times, and then were banished. The mass suicide, one of the most pivotal and important elements in the narrative of 9/11, was expunged. It remains expunged from public consciousness.
The “jumpers” did not fit into the myth the nation demanded. The fate of the “jumpers” said something so profound, so disturbing, about our own fate, smallness in the universe and fragility that it had to be banned. The “jumpers” illustrated that there are thresholds of suffering that elicit a willing embrace of death. The “jumpers” reminded us that there will come, to all of us, final moments when the only choice will be, at best, how we will choose to die, not how we are going to live. And we can die before we physically expire.
The shock of 9/11, however, demanded images and stories of resilience, redemption, heroism, courage, self-sacrifice and generosity, not collective suicide in the face of overwhelming hopelessness and despair.
Reporters in moments of crisis become clinicians. They collect data, facts, descriptions, basic information, and carry out interviews as swiftly as possible. We make these facts fit into familiar narratives. We do not create facts but we manipulate them. We make facts conform to our perceptions of ourselves as Americans and human beings. We work within the confines of national myth. We make journalism and history a refuge from memory. The pretense that mass murder and suicide can be transformed into a tribute to the victory of the human spirit was the lie we all told to the public that day and have been telling ever since.
We make sense of the present only through the lens of the past, as the French philosopher Maurice Halbwachs pointed out, recognizing that “our conceptions of the past are affected by the mental images we employ to solve present problems, so that collective memory is essentially a reconstruction of the past in the light of the present. … Memory needs continuous feeding from collective sources and is sustained by social and moral props.”
I returned that night to the newsroom hacking from the fumes released by the burning asbestos, jet fuel, lead, mercury, cellulose and construction debris. I sat at my computer, my thin paper mask still hanging from my neck, trying to write and catch my breath. All who had been at the site that day were noticeable in the newsroom because they were struggling for air. Most of us were convulsed by shock and grief.
There would soon, however, be another reaction. Those of us who were close to the epicenters of the 9/11 attacks would primarily grieve and mourn. Those who had some distance would indulge in the growing nationalist cant and calls for blood that would soon triumph over reason and sanity. Nationalism was a disease I knew intimately as a war correspondent. It is anti-thought. It is primarily about self-exaltation. The flip side of nationalism is always racism, the dehumanization of the enemy and all who appear to question the cause. The plague of nationalism began almost immediately. My son, who was 11, asked me what the difference was between cars flying small American flags and cars flying large American flags.
“The people with the really big flags are the really big assholes,” I told him.
The dead in the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania were used to sanctify the state’s lust for war. To question the rush to war became to dishonor our martyrs.
Those of us who knew that the attacks were rooted in the long night of humiliation and suffering inflicted by Israel on the Palestinians, the imposition of our military bases in the Middle East and in the brutal Arab dictatorships that we funded and supported became apostates. We became defenders of the indefensible. We were apologists, as Christopher Hitchens shouted at me on a stage in Berkeley, “for suicide bombers.”
Because few cared to examine our activities in the Muslim world, the attacks became certified as incomprehensible by the state and its lap dogs, the press. Those who carried out the attacks were branded as rising out of a culture and religion that was at best primitive and probably evil. The Quran—although it forbids suicide as well as the murder of women and children—was painted as a manual for fanaticism and terror. The attackers embodied the titanic clash of civilizations, the cosmic battle under way between good and evil, the forces of light and darkness. Images of the planes crashing into the towers and heroic rescuers emerging from the rubble were played and replayed. We were deluged with painful stories of the survivors and victims. The deaths and falling towers became iconographic.
The ceremonies of remembrance were skillfully hijacked by the purveyors of war and hatred. They became vehicles to justify doing to others what had been done to us. And as innocents died here, soon other innocents began to die in the Muslim world. A life for a life. Murder for murder. Death for death. Terror for terror.
What was played out in the weeks after the attacks was the old, familiar battle between force and human imagination, between the crude instruments of violence and the capacity for empathy and understanding. Human imagination lost. Coldblooded reason, which does not speak the language of the imagination, won. We began to speak and think in the empty, mindless nationalist clichés about terror that the state handed to us. We became what we abhorred. The deaths were used to justify pre-emptive war, invasion, Shock and Awe, prolonged occupation, targeted assassinations, torture, offshore penal colonies, gunning down families at checkpoints, massive aerial bombardments, drone attacks, missile strikes and the killing of dozens and soon hundreds and then thousands and later tens of thousands and finally hundreds of thousands of innocent people. We produced piles of corpses in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan, and extended the reach of our killing machine to Yemen and Somalia. And by beatifying our dead, by cementing into the national psyche fear and the imperative of permanent war, and by stoking our collective humiliation, the state carried out crimes, atrocities and killings that dwarfed anything carried out against us on 9/11. The best that force can do is impose order. It can never elicit harmony. And force was justified, and is still justified, by the first dead. Ten years later these dead haunt us like Banquo’s ghost.
“It is the first death which infects everyone with the feelings of being threatened,” wrote Elias Canetti. “It is impossible to overrate the part played by the first dead man in the kindling of wars. Rulers who want to unleash war know very well that they must procure or invent a first victim. It needs not be anyone of particular importance, and can even be someone quite unknown. Nothing matters except his death; and it must be believed that the enemy is responsible for this. Every possible cause of his death is suppressed except one: his membership of the group to which one belongs oneself.”
We were unable to accept the reality of this anonymous slaughter. We were unable because it exposed the awful truth that we live in a morally neutral universe where human life, including our life, can be snuffed out in senseless and random violence. It showed us that there is no protection, not from God, fate, luck, omens or the state.
We have still not woken up to whom we have become, to the fatal erosion of domestic and international law and the senseless waste of lives, resources and trillions of dollars to wage wars that ultimately we can never win. We do not see that our own faces have become as contorted as the faces of the demented hijackers who seized the three commercial jetliners a decade ago. We do not grasp that Osama bin Laden’s twisted vision of a world of indiscriminate violence and terror has triumphed. The attacks turned us into monsters, grotesque ghouls, sadists and killers who drop bombs on village children and waterboard those we kidnap, strip of their rights and hold for years without due process. We acted before we were able to think. And it is the satanic lust of violence that has us locked in its grip.
As Wordsworth wrote:
We could have gone another route. We could have built on the profound sympathy and empathy that swept through the world following the attacks. The revulsion over the crimes that took place 10 years ago, including in the Muslim world, where I was working in the weeks and months after 9/11, was nearly universal. The attacks, if we had turned them over to intelligence agencies and diplomats, might have opened possibilities not of war and death but ultimately reconciliation and communication, of redressing the wrongs that we commit in the Middle East and that are committed by Israel with our blessing. It was a moment we squandered. Our brutality and triumphalism, the byproducts of nationalism and our infantile pride, revived the jihadist movement. We became the radical Islamist movement’s most effective recruiting tool. We descended to its barbarity. We became terrorists too. The sad legacy of 9/11 is that the assholes, on each side, won.
The south tower went down around 10 a.m. with a guttural roar. Huge rolling gray clouds of noxious smoke, dust, gas, pulverized concrete, gypsum and the grit of human remains enveloped lower Manhattan. The sun was obscured. The north tower collapsed about 30 minutes later. The dust hung like a shroud over Manhattan.
I headed toward the spot where the towers once stood, passing dazed, ashen and speechless groups of police officers and firefighters. I would pull out a notebook to ask questions and no sounds would come out of their mouths. They forlornly shook their heads and warded me away gently with their hands. By the time I arrived at Ground Zero it was a moonscape; whole floors of the towers had collapsed like an accordion. I pulled out pieces of paper from one floor, and a few feet below were papers from 30 floors away. Small bits of human bodies—a foot in a woman’s shoe, a bit of a leg, part of a torso—lay scattered amid the wreckage.
Scores of people, perhaps more than 200, pushed through the smoke and heat to jump to their deaths from windows that had broken or they had smashed. Sometimes they did this alone, sometimes in pairs. But it seems they took turns, one body cascading downward followed by another. The last acts of individuality. They fell for about 10 seconds, many flailing or replicating the motion of swimmers, reaching 150 miles an hour. Their clothes and, in a few cases, their improvised parachutes made from drapes or tablecloths shredded. They smashed into the pavement with unnerving, sickening thuds. Thump. Thump. Thump. Those who witnessed it were particularly shaken by the sounds the bodies made on impact.
The images of the “jumpers” proved too gruesome for the TV networks. Even before the towers collapsed, the falling men and women were censored from live broadcasts. Isolated pictures appeared the next day in papers, including The New York Times, and then were banished. The mass suicide, one of the most pivotal and important elements in the narrative of 9/11, was expunged. It remains expunged from public consciousness.
The “jumpers” did not fit into the myth the nation demanded. The fate of the “jumpers” said something so profound, so disturbing, about our own fate, smallness in the universe and fragility that it had to be banned. The “jumpers” illustrated that there are thresholds of suffering that elicit a willing embrace of death. The “jumpers” reminded us that there will come, to all of us, final moments when the only choice will be, at best, how we will choose to die, not how we are going to live. And we can die before we physically expire.
The shock of 9/11, however, demanded images and stories of resilience, redemption, heroism, courage, self-sacrifice and generosity, not collective suicide in the face of overwhelming hopelessness and despair.
Reporters in moments of crisis become clinicians. They collect data, facts, descriptions, basic information, and carry out interviews as swiftly as possible. We make these facts fit into familiar narratives. We do not create facts but we manipulate them. We make facts conform to our perceptions of ourselves as Americans and human beings. We work within the confines of national myth. We make journalism and history a refuge from memory. The pretense that mass murder and suicide can be transformed into a tribute to the victory of the human spirit was the lie we all told to the public that day and have been telling ever since.
We make sense of the present only through the lens of the past, as the French philosopher Maurice Halbwachs pointed out, recognizing that “our conceptions of the past are affected by the mental images we employ to solve present problems, so that collective memory is essentially a reconstruction of the past in the light of the present. … Memory needs continuous feeding from collective sources and is sustained by social and moral props.”
I returned that night to the newsroom hacking from the fumes released by the burning asbestos, jet fuel, lead, mercury, cellulose and construction debris. I sat at my computer, my thin paper mask still hanging from my neck, trying to write and catch my breath. All who had been at the site that day were noticeable in the newsroom because they were struggling for air. Most of us were convulsed by shock and grief.
There would soon, however, be another reaction. Those of us who were close to the epicenters of the 9/11 attacks would primarily grieve and mourn. Those who had some distance would indulge in the growing nationalist cant and calls for blood that would soon triumph over reason and sanity. Nationalism was a disease I knew intimately as a war correspondent. It is anti-thought. It is primarily about self-exaltation. The flip side of nationalism is always racism, the dehumanization of the enemy and all who appear to question the cause. The plague of nationalism began almost immediately. My son, who was 11, asked me what the difference was between cars flying small American flags and cars flying large American flags.
“The people with the really big flags are the really big assholes,” I told him.
The dead in the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania were used to sanctify the state’s lust for war. To question the rush to war became to dishonor our martyrs.
Those of us who knew that the attacks were rooted in the long night of humiliation and suffering inflicted by Israel on the Palestinians, the imposition of our military bases in the Middle East and in the brutal Arab dictatorships that we funded and supported became apostates. We became defenders of the indefensible. We were apologists, as Christopher Hitchens shouted at me on a stage in Berkeley, “for suicide bombers.”
Because few cared to examine our activities in the Muslim world, the attacks became certified as incomprehensible by the state and its lap dogs, the press. Those who carried out the attacks were branded as rising out of a culture and religion that was at best primitive and probably evil. The Quran—although it forbids suicide as well as the murder of women and children—was painted as a manual for fanaticism and terror. The attackers embodied the titanic clash of civilizations, the cosmic battle under way between good and evil, the forces of light and darkness. Images of the planes crashing into the towers and heroic rescuers emerging from the rubble were played and replayed. We were deluged with painful stories of the survivors and victims. The deaths and falling towers became iconographic.
The ceremonies of remembrance were skillfully hijacked by the purveyors of war and hatred. They became vehicles to justify doing to others what had been done to us. And as innocents died here, soon other innocents began to die in the Muslim world. A life for a life. Murder for murder. Death for death. Terror for terror.
What was played out in the weeks after the attacks was the old, familiar battle between force and human imagination, between the crude instruments of violence and the capacity for empathy and understanding. Human imagination lost. Coldblooded reason, which does not speak the language of the imagination, won. We began to speak and think in the empty, mindless nationalist clichés about terror that the state handed to us. We became what we abhorred. The deaths were used to justify pre-emptive war, invasion, Shock and Awe, prolonged occupation, targeted assassinations, torture, offshore penal colonies, gunning down families at checkpoints, massive aerial bombardments, drone attacks, missile strikes and the killing of dozens and soon hundreds and then thousands and later tens of thousands and finally hundreds of thousands of innocent people. We produced piles of corpses in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan, and extended the reach of our killing machine to Yemen and Somalia. And by beatifying our dead, by cementing into the national psyche fear and the imperative of permanent war, and by stoking our collective humiliation, the state carried out crimes, atrocities and killings that dwarfed anything carried out against us on 9/11. The best that force can do is impose order. It can never elicit harmony. And force was justified, and is still justified, by the first dead. Ten years later these dead haunt us like Banquo’s ghost.
“It is the first death which infects everyone with the feelings of being threatened,” wrote Elias Canetti. “It is impossible to overrate the part played by the first dead man in the kindling of wars. Rulers who want to unleash war know very well that they must procure or invent a first victim. It needs not be anyone of particular importance, and can even be someone quite unknown. Nothing matters except his death; and it must be believed that the enemy is responsible for this. Every possible cause of his death is suppressed except one: his membership of the group to which one belongs oneself.”
We were unable to accept the reality of this anonymous slaughter. We were unable because it exposed the awful truth that we live in a morally neutral universe where human life, including our life, can be snuffed out in senseless and random violence. It showed us that there is no protection, not from God, fate, luck, omens or the state.
We have still not woken up to whom we have become, to the fatal erosion of domestic and international law and the senseless waste of lives, resources and trillions of dollars to wage wars that ultimately we can never win. We do not see that our own faces have become as contorted as the faces of the demented hijackers who seized the three commercial jetliners a decade ago. We do not grasp that Osama bin Laden’s twisted vision of a world of indiscriminate violence and terror has triumphed. The attacks turned us into monsters, grotesque ghouls, sadists and killers who drop bombs on village children and waterboard those we kidnap, strip of their rights and hold for years without due process. We acted before we were able to think. And it is the satanic lust of violence that has us locked in its grip.
As Wordsworth wrote:
Action is transitory—a step, a blow,
The motion of a muscle—this way or that—
’Tis done; and in the after-vacancy
We wonder at ourselves like men betrayed:
Suffering is permanent, obscure and dark,
And has the nature of infinity.
We could have gone another route. We could have built on the profound sympathy and empathy that swept through the world following the attacks. The revulsion over the crimes that took place 10 years ago, including in the Muslim world, where I was working in the weeks and months after 9/11, was nearly universal. The attacks, if we had turned them over to intelligence agencies and diplomats, might have opened possibilities not of war and death but ultimately reconciliation and communication, of redressing the wrongs that we commit in the Middle East and that are committed by Israel with our blessing. It was a moment we squandered. Our brutality and triumphalism, the byproducts of nationalism and our infantile pride, revived the jihadist movement. We became the radical Islamist movement’s most effective recruiting tool. We descended to its barbarity. We became terrorists too. The sad legacy of 9/11 is that the assholes, on each side, won.
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