> Where were you when the planes hit the Twin Towers?
Islamist " appeasers" are not interested in facts nor truth.
They suffer from the same mental illness of pure hate mongering and
killing as the Terrorist Islamist swine do. Oh yes ! They are the
purist of filthy swine !
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> ---
> laughing at everyone's dismay
> did they really think a US interventionist/pre-emptive war policy
> would stand unopposed?
>
> who will be surprised during the next attack?
>
> On Sep 9, 11:34 am, MJ <micha...@america.net> wrote:
>
>
>
> > A Bloody Decade of Fear and Vauntingby Anthony GregoryOn September 10, 2001, many who thirsted for liberty smelled hope in the air. The Clinton era was over and the new Bush era showed signs of being less eventful, even more peaceful. The Republican had won on a platform of a humbler foreign policy than Clinton-Gore's, and had by late 2001 pushed through his tax cut. More to the point, he already seemed an impotent president, having just barely won after one of the most contentious rounds of recounts and court challenges in electoral history. The Senate was split down the middle. Much of Bush's domestic policy, itself an unconvincing continuation of Clintonian moderation, seemed doomed, and on foreign policy – such as in his handling of the China spy plane affair – he was refreshingly calm compared to the more hawkish elements of his party.
> > Clinton hadn't even been that bad, even considering the steady expansion of regulations, a horribly unjust war (though not one as terrible as Operation Desert Storm), and the largest single federal law enforcement atrocity in living memory. But he was not the LBJ or FDR he wanted to be, and yet he helped awaken a new distrust in government, especially on the right, that had been asleep throughout the Reagan-Bush wrap-up of the Cold War years. For people to hate even Clinton's generally milquetoast tyranny so much was a wonderful thing to witness. All in all, throughout the 1990s, government had grown at a manageable pace compared to the economy, there was even a nominal surplus in 1998, and the growing Internet pointed to new opportunities for technology and freedom. U.S. foreign policy had been steadily aggressive, especially in the Middle East, but this did not pose the direct threat to liberty at home that would come to distinguish the years that followed.
> > On September 10, 2001, I was a 20-year-old American history student in my junior year at UC Berkeley, hopeful that the next decade would be as relatively placid as the Clinton years. My friends and I sat and watchedThis Is Spinal Tapthat night, embodying that pre-9/11 mentality that has been so viciously derided ever since.
> > A phone call from my dad woke me up the next morning. A few of my roommates were already watching the news. Talking heads on Fox, which I had preferred to the statist liberals on CNN, were calling for blood, saying it was time to let loose "the dogs of war." It was the beginning of a nightmare that has so far lasted ten years.
> > Although my college buddies and I lived in the pre-9/11 bubble, having come of age in the boom times of the 1990s, we were not ignorant of the conditions that likely led to this attack – one-sided support for Israel, the U.S. troops stationed in Saudi Arabia, the sanctions that killed half a million Iraqi children. Libertarians and others had warned for years aboutthe threat of blowback. Berkeley was a fairly safe place to be a peacenik and that month I was glad to be where I was. Nevertheless, it was depressing that virtually no one in the wider culture was drawing the clear connection between terrorism and America's brutal policy of wars, sanctions, and occupations.
> > With very few exceptions, war fever swept the nation in September 2001. The entire right, barring a few voices in the wilderness, reverted to full-blown jingoist nationalism. Most progressives were at the best ambivalent on the prospect of war against the Taliban. Even many libertarians clung to the state for protection. Prominent Objectivists demanded that the U.S. nuke ten countries as a show of force.
> > All of a sudden Bush was a hero. His approval rating shot up dramatically, even though all he did, at the very best, was fail to stop 9/11. This massive failure on the part of U.S. intelligence and security policy would never be looked at seriously in the mainstream media or in the top echelons of U.S. politics. The fact that the FBI had been infiltrating al Qaeda in the United States since 1989 and had tracked Zacarias Moussaoui in the summer of 2001 is barely remembered, along with the Taliban's offer after 9/11 to hand over bin Laden if proof of his guilt was offered.
> > The immediate aftermath was surreal to observe. Throughout September I was still under the impression that Gore would have reacted worse to the crisis – and to this day I'm not 100% convinced otherwise, although it's much harder to believe. The anthrax scare came – another incident that has since gone down the memory hole. The bombs began falling on Kabul in October, and victory over the Taliban was declared. (Nearly ten years later, we are still hearing about how the Taliban will eventually be defeated once and for all.) Then came the Patriot Act, the destruction of almost all that remained from a Fourth Amendment previously abused for years in the war on drugs. Support for the onslaught on our freedoms was almost unanimous on the Hill.
> > I hoped this hysteria would soon subside, but throughout 2002 we heard the war drums beating, at rising intensity, for Iraqi blood. It was a most ominous year, a sense that we were trapped in an alternate universe permeating everything, because anyone paying the least bit of attention could have told you that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. Even Afghanistan was virtually unrelated, at least in any way that would make the war there logical. But Iraq? Saddam was Osama bin Laden's enemy. The regime was secular. Its WMD were non-existent, we had good reasons to believe, and the only reason we should fear any that did exist was if the U.S. were to invade – as the CIA reminded us up until the unleashing of Shock and Awe.
> > In March 2003, the U.S. government opened a whirlwind of terror upon the people of Iraq, duplicating the destruction of 9/11 many times over. Thousands of bombs were dropped, including some weighing in at a ton, such as the celebrated Joint Direct Attack Munition that got all the press that week. The obscenity of war ecstasy gripped the nation even greater than it had when the U.S. invaded Afghanistan. I vividly remember a homeless guy on a bus attentively studying a newspaper article featuring photographs and descriptions of the major weaponry deployed by the U.S. He pointed it out to a fellow derelict, who was disgusted by this morbid fascination. "Don't show me that. All they have is rocks and shit! We're gonna go in there and kill them. They're poorer than us. They ain't no threat to us. We're just gonna go and run them over." This exchange was intellectually superior to almost anything on the networks in those days.
> > Another odd thing I noticed was how much the political dynamic had shifted, not just temporarily in the brief aftermath of 9/11, but all the way through the opening of the Iraq war, with the metamorphosis seemingly progressing by the day. The conservative movement no longer saw government as a major threat at all. The socialists, meanwhile, protested the war. As a libertarian in Berkeley, I was greatly frustrated by this situation. But the way that the War Party was even more enthusiastic about Iraq than Afghanistan demonstrated that the problem was a long-term cultural one that would likely persist for generations.
> > By 2004 there were some signs of hope.Fahrenheit 9/11was an antiwar movie with popular reach. The torture scandal that erupted in April, when photos from Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, a notorious torture facility run by Saddam and now reopened for business by Americans, demonstrated the depths of U.S. depravity, there was a silver lining: Many were genuinely disgusted. Around the same time the Supreme Court began questioning some of Bush's most presumptuous claims of unlimited detention power, at Guantánamo and at home. Maybe these excesses would be reined in. Maybe the war on terror itself would end.
> > That was over seven years ago. Everyone at the top responsible for those atrocities have been shielded by the current administration, and most of their injustices continued.
> > In August of 2004, the 9/11 Commission published its superficial report, the last such federal investigation of any significance. Almost all of its recommendations were for a more active federal role in stopping terrorism, rather than ratcheting back or even seriously rearranging its failed intelligence approaches.
> > The Democrats put up John Kerry, quite the hawk compared to Howard Dean, but at least he was raising some good questions in the debates on Iraq, even if he was essentially a dedicated interventionist, especially on Afghanistan. When Bush won reelection in 2004, every American peacenik's heart sank. It was a horrible pill to swallow. He had proudly run promising to stay the course after the worst four years for American liberty since Richard Nixon, and won by a larger margin than in 2000.
> > More scandals emerged in 2005. An increasing number of Americans saw the Iraq war for what it was – a crusade fought in vain built on a mountain of lies. The new Iraq constitution was obviously not a triumph for freedom, given its socialism and blow against secularism. The terrible response to Katrina in September 2005 made the Bush administration fair game for mainstream criticism. In December 2005 we found out that the Bush administration had been using the NSA to spy on telecommunications without even the lackadaisical warrants authorized by FISA. For a few days, there was outrage, and it continued to be a talking point among Bush's political opponents for a couple more years. It was good to see that the newly reelected presidential team was discredited a year into their second term. By the end of 2005, pundits were even musing about
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