Re: A Bloody Decade of Fear and Vaunting

On Sep 9, 12:53 pm, plainolamerican <plainolameri...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 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 !

****************************************************************************************************************************
> ---
> 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
>
> ...
>
> read more »- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -

--
Thanks for being part of "PoliticalForum" at Google Groups.
For options & help see http://groups.google.com/group/PoliticalForum

* Visit our other community at http://www.PoliticalForum.com/
* It's active and moderated. Register and vote in our polls.
* Read the latest breaking news, and more.

Re: Michelle Malkin Is Upset

the US intervention policy started the hatred
you can either continue to warmonger with those animals or leave them
to their own demise

On Sep 9, 12:04 pm, MJ <micha...@america.net> wrote:
> Michelle Malkin Is UpsetPosted byLaurence Vanceon September 9, 2011 10:07 AM
> She is upset about anew pollreleased this week showing that Americans today "are generally more willing to believe that U.S. policies in the Middle East might have motivated the 9/11 terror attacks on New York and the Pentagon."
> I don't think I need to say that this comes as no surprise since she is one of the conservative movement's finest bloodthirsty warmongers.
> xxxAll the Wrong 9/11 Lessonsby Michelle Malkin
> 09/09/2011
> Are your kids learning the right lessons about 9/11? Ten years after Osama bin Laden's henchmen murdered thousands of innocents on American soil, too many children have been spoon-fed the thin gruel of progressive political correctness over the stiff antidote of truth.
>        
> "Know your enemy, name your enemy" is a 9/11 message that has gone unheeded. Our immigration and homeland security policies refuse to profile jihadi adherents at foreign consular offices and at our borders. Our military leaders refuse to expunge them from uniformed ranks until it's too late (see: Fort Hood massacre). The j-word is discouraged in Obama intelligence circles, and the term "Islamic extremism" was removed from the U.S. national security strategy document last year.
>        
> Similarly, too many teachers refuse to show and tell who the perpetrators of 9/11 were and who their heirs are today. My own daughter was one year old when the Twin Towers collapsed, the Pentagon went up in flames and Shanksville, Pa., became hallowed ground for the brave passengers of United Flight 93. In second grade, her teachers read touchy-feely stories about peace and diversity to honor the 9/11 dead. They whitewashed Osama bin Laden, militant Islam and centuries-old jihad out of the curriculum. Apparently, the youngsters weren't ready to learn even the most basic information about the evil masterminds of Islamic terrorism.
>        
> Mary Beth Hicks, author of the new book "Don't Let the Kids Drink the Kool-Aid," points to a recent review of 10 widely used textbooks in which the concepts of jihad and sharia were either watered down or absent. These childhood experts have determined that grade school is too early to delve into the specifics of the homicidal clash of Allah's sharia-avenging soldiers with the freedom-loving Western world.
>        
> Yet, many of the same protectors of fragile elementary-school pupils can't wait to teach them all the ins and outs of condoms, cross-dressers and crack addictions.
>        
> We pulled our daughter out of a cesspool of academic and moral relativism and found a reality-grounded, rigorous charter school where no-nonsense teachers refuse to sugarcoat inconvenient facts and history. Many of the students are children of soldiers and servicemen and women who -- inspired by the heroes of 9/11 -- have voluntarily deployed time and time again to kill the American Dream destroyers abroad before they kill us over here.
>        
> There's no better way to hammer home the message that "freedom is not free" than to have your kids go to school with other kids whose dads and moms are gone for years at a time -- missing births and birthday parties, recitals and soccer practice, Christmas pageants and Independence Day fireworks.
>        
> But instead of unfettered pride in our armed forces, social justice educators in high schools and colleges across the country indoctrinate American students into viewing our volunteer armed forces as victims, monsters and pawns in a leftist "social struggle."
>       
> A decade after the 9/11 attacks, Blame America-ism still permeates classrooms and the culture. A special 9/11 curriculum distributed in New Jersey schools advises teachers to "avoid graphic details or dramatizing the destruction" wrought by the 9/11 hijackers, and instead focus elementary school students' attention on broadly defined "intolerance" and "hurtful words."
>        
> No surprise: Jihadist utterances such as "Kill the Jews," "Allahu Akbar" and "Behead all those who insult Islam" are not among the "hurtful words" studied.
>        
> Middle-schoolers are directed to "analyze diversity and prejudice in U.S. history." And high-school students are taught "Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs" - pop-psychology claptrap used to excuse jihadists' behavior based on their purported low self-esteem and oppressed status caused by "European colonialism."
>        
> It is no wonder that a new poll released this week showed that Americans today "are generally more willing to believe that U.S. policies in the Middle East might have motivated the 9/11 terror attacks on New York and the Pentagon," according to Reuters.
>        
> To make matters worse, we have an appeaser-in-chief who wrote shortly after the jihadist attacks a decade ago that the "essence of this tragedy" derives "from a fundamental absence of empathy on the part of the attackers: an inability to imagine, or connect with, the humanity and suffering of others." A "climate of poverty and ignorance" caused the attacks, then-Illinois stateSen. Barack Obamapreached. Never mind the Ivy League and Oxford educations, the oil wealth and the middle-class status of legions of al-Qaida plotters and operatives.
>        
> 9/11 was a deliberate, carefully planned evil act of the long-waged war on the West by Koran-inspired soldiers of Allah around the world. They hated us before George W. Bush was in office. They hated us before Israel existed. And the avengers of the religion of perpetual outrage will keep hating us no matter how much we try to appease them.
>        
> The post-9/11 problem isn't whether we'll forget. The problem is: Will we ever learn?http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=46057

--
Thanks for being part of "PoliticalForum" at Google Groups.
For options & help see http://groups.google.com/group/PoliticalForum

* Visit our other community at http://www.PoliticalForum.com/
* It's active and moderated. Register and vote in our polls.
* Read the latest breaking news, and more.

Re: Michelle Malkin Is Upset

On Sep 9, 1:04 pm, MJ <micha...@america.net> wrote:

Michelle Malkin ( as usual ) is spot on , while Laurence Vance
has his head up where the sun don't shine.

***********************************************************************************************************************
> Michelle Malkin Is UpsetPosted byLaurence Vanceon September 9, 2011 10:07 AM
> She is upset about anew pollreleased this week showing that Americans today "are generally more willing to believe that U.S. policies in the Middle East might have motivated the 9/11 terror attacks on New York and the Pentagon."
> I don't think I need to say that this comes as no surprise since she is one of the conservative movement's finest bloodthirsty warmongers.
> xxxAll the Wrong 9/11 Lessonsby Michelle Malkin
> 09/09/2011
> Are your kids learning the right lessons about 9/11? Ten years after Osama bin Laden's henchmen murdered thousands of innocents on American soil, too many children have been spoon-fed the thin gruel of progressive political correctness over the stiff antidote of truth.
>        
> "Know your enemy, name your enemy" is a 9/11 message that has gone unheeded. Our immigration and homeland security policies refuse to profile jihadi adherents at foreign consular offices and at our borders. Our military leaders refuse to expunge them from uniformed ranks until it's too late (see: Fort Hood massacre). The j-word is discouraged in Obama intelligence circles, and the term "Islamic extremism" was removed from the U.S. national security strategy document last year.
>        
> Similarly, too many teachers refuse to show and tell who the perpetrators of 9/11 were and who their heirs are today. My own daughter was one year old when the Twin Towers collapsed, the Pentagon went up in flames and Shanksville, Pa., became hallowed ground for the brave passengers of United Flight 93. In second grade, her teachers read touchy-feely stories about peace and diversity to honor the 9/11 dead. They whitewashed Osama bin Laden, militant Islam and centuries-old jihad out of the curriculum. Apparently, the youngsters weren't ready to learn even the most basic information about the evil masterminds of Islamic terrorism.
>        
> Mary Beth Hicks, author of the new book "Don't Let the Kids Drink the Kool-Aid," points to a recent review of 10 widely used textbooks in which the concepts of jihad and sharia were either watered down or absent. These childhood experts have determined that grade school is too early to delve into the specifics of the homicidal clash of Allah's sharia-avenging soldiers with the freedom-loving Western world.
>        
> Yet, many of the same protectors of fragile elementary-school pupils can't wait to teach them all the ins and outs of condoms, cross-dressers and crack addictions.
>        
> We pulled our daughter out of a cesspool of academic and moral relativism and found a reality-grounded, rigorous charter school where no-nonsense teachers refuse to sugarcoat inconvenient facts and history. Many of the students are children of soldiers and servicemen and women who -- inspired by the heroes of 9/11 -- have voluntarily deployed time and time again to kill the American Dream destroyers abroad before they kill us over here.
>        
> There's no better way to hammer home the message that "freedom is not free" than to have your kids go to school with other kids whose dads and moms are gone for years at a time -- missing births and birthday parties, recitals and soccer practice, Christmas pageants and Independence Day fireworks.
>        
> But instead of unfettered pride in our armed forces, social justice educators in high schools and colleges across the country indoctrinate American students into viewing our volunteer armed forces as victims, monsters and pawns in a leftist "social struggle."
>       
> A decade after the 9/11 attacks, Blame America-ism still permeates classrooms and the culture. A special 9/11 curriculum distributed in New Jersey schools advises teachers to "avoid graphic details or dramatizing the destruction" wrought by the 9/11 hijackers, and instead focus elementary school students' attention on broadly defined "intolerance" and "hurtful words."
>        
> No surprise: Jihadist utterances such as "Kill the Jews," "Allahu Akbar" and "Behead all those who insult Islam" are not among the "hurtful words" studied.
>        
> Middle-schoolers are directed to "analyze diversity and prejudice in U.S. history." And high-school students are taught "Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs" - pop-psychology claptrap used to excuse jihadists' behavior based on their purported low self-esteem and oppressed status caused by "European colonialism."
>        
> It is no wonder that a new poll released this week showed that Americans today "are generally more willing to believe that U.S. policies in the Middle East might have motivated the 9/11 terror attacks on New York and the Pentagon," according to Reuters.
>        
> To make matters worse, we have an appeaser-in-chief who wrote shortly after the jihadist attacks a decade ago that the "essence of this tragedy" derives "from a fundamental absence of empathy on the part of the attackers: an inability to imagine, or connect with, the humanity and suffering of others." A "climate of poverty and ignorance" caused the attacks, then-Illinois stateSen. Barack Obamapreached. Never mind the Ivy League and Oxford educations, the oil wealth and the middle-class status of legions of al-Qaida plotters and operatives.
>        
> 9/11 was a deliberate, carefully planned evil act of the long-waged war on the West by Koran-inspired soldiers of Allah around the world. They hated us before George W. Bush was in office. They hated us before Israel existed. And the avengers of the religion of perpetual outrage will keep hating us no matter how much we try to appease them.
>        
> The post-9/11 problem isn't whether we'll forget. The problem is: Will we ever learn?http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=46057

--
Thanks for being part of "PoliticalForum" at Google Groups.
For options & help see http://groups.google.com/group/PoliticalForum

* Visit our other community at http://www.PoliticalForum.com/
* It's active and moderated. Register and vote in our polls.
* Read the latest breaking news, and more.

Michelle Malkin Is Upset

Michelle Malkin Is Upset
Posted by Laurence Vance on September 9, 2011 10:07 AM

She is upset about a new poll released this week showing that Americans today "are generally more willing to believe that U.S. policies in the Middle East might have motivated the 9/11 terror attacks on New York and the Pentagon."

I don't think I need to say that this comes as no surprise since she is one of the conservative movement's finest bloodthirsty warmongers.

xxx

All the Wrong 9/11 Lessons
by  Michelle Malkin
09/09/2011

Are your kids learning the right lessons about 9/11? Ten years after Osama bin Laden's henchmen murdered thousands of innocents on American soil, too many children have been spoon-fed the thin gruel of progressive political correctness over the stiff antidote of truth.
       
"Know your enemy, name your enemy" is a 9/11 message that has gone unheeded. Our immigration and homeland security policies refuse to profile jihadi adherents at foreign consular offices and at our borders. Our military leaders refuse to expunge them from uniformed ranks until it's too late (see: Fort Hood massacre). The j-word is discouraged in Obama intelligence circles, and the term "Islamic extremism" was removed from the U.S. national security strategy document last year.
       
Similarly, too many teachers refuse to show and tell who the perpetrators of 9/11 were and who their heirs are today. My own daughter was one year old when the Twin Towers collapsed, the Pentagon went up in flames and Shanksville, Pa., became hallowed ground for the brave passengers of United Flight 93. In second grade, her teachers read touchy-feely stories about peace and diversity to honor the 9/11 dead. They whitewashed Osama bin Laden, militant Islam and centuries-old jihad out of the curriculum. Apparently, the youngsters weren't ready to learn even the most basic information about the evil masterminds of Islamic terrorism.
       
Mary Beth Hicks, author of the new book " Don't Let the Kids Drink the Kool-Aid," points to a recent review of 10 widely used textbooks in which the concepts of jihad and sharia were either watered down or absent. These childhood experts have determined that grade school is too early to delve into the specifics of the homicidal clash of Allah's sharia-avenging soldiers with the freedom-loving Western world.
       
Yet, many of the same protectors of fragile elementary-school pupils can't wait to teach them all the ins and outs of condoms, cross-dressers and crack addictions.
       
We pulled our daughter out of a cesspool of academic and moral relativism and found a reality-grounded, rigorous charter school where no-nonsense teachers refuse to sugarcoat inconvenient facts and history. Many of the students are children of soldiers and servicemen and women who -- inspired by the heroes of 9/11 -- have voluntarily deployed time and time again to kill the American Dream destroyers abroad before they kill us over here.
       
There's no better way to hammer home the message that "freedom is not free" than to have your kids go to school with other kids whose dads and moms are gone for years at a time -- missing births and birthday parties, recitals and soccer practice, Christmas pageants and Independence Day fireworks.
       
But instead of unfettered pride in our armed forces, social justice educators in high schools and colleges across the country indoctrinate American students into viewing our volunteer armed forces as victims, monsters and pawns in a leftist "social struggle."
      
A decade after the 9/11 attacks, Blame America-ism still permeates classrooms and the culture. A special 9/11 curriculum distributed in New Jersey schools advises teachers to "avoid graphic details or dramatizing the destruction" wrought by the 9/11 hijackers, and instead focus elementary school students' attention on broadly defined "intolerance" and "hurtful words."
       
No surprise: Jihadist utterances such as "Kill the Jews," "Allahu Akbar" and "Behead all those who insult Islam" are not among the "hurtful words" studied.
       
Middle-schoolers are directed to "analyze diversity and prejudice in U.S. history." And high-school students are taught "Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs" - pop-psychology claptrap used to excuse jihadists' behavior based on their purported low self-esteem and oppressed status caused by "European colonialism."
       
It is no wonder that a new poll released this week showed that Americans today "are generally more willing to believe that U.S. policies in the Middle East might have motivated the 9/11 terror attacks on New York and the Pentagon," according to Reuters.
       
To make matters worse, we have an appeaser-in-chief who wrote shortly after the jihadist attacks a decade ago that the "essence of this tragedy" derives "from a fundamental absence of empathy on the part of the attackers: an inability to imagine, or connect with, the humanity and suffering of others." A "climate of poverty and ignorance" caused the attacks, then-Illinois state Sen. Barack Obama preached. Never mind the Ivy League and Oxford educations, the oil wealth and the middle-class status of legions of al-Qaida plotters and operatives.
       
9/11 was a deliberate, carefully planned evil act of the long-waged war on the West by Koran-inspired soldiers of Allah around the world. They hated us before George W. Bush was in office. They hated us before Israel existed. And the avengers of the religion of perpetual outrage will keep hating us no matter how much we try to appease them.
       
The post-9/11 problem isn't whether we'll forget. The problem is: Will we ever learn?

http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=46057

Twelve Words to Describe Obama's Jobs Speech

Hello,



Shared while visiting FoxNews.com:

Twelve Words to Describe Obama's Jobs Speech

President Obama's speech Thursday night before a joint session of Congress struck me as arrogant, small and tired. And that's just for starters.

---

This email is a direct message from a friend who wants to share an item of interest with you.
This email message is powered by Gigya's sharing technology. If you no longer wish to receive messages that are sent via Gigya's service, please click here to remove your email address.
Gigya Inc., 1975 Landings Dr., Mountain View, CA 94043.

Re: A Bloody Decade of Fear and Vaunting

Where were you when the planes hit the Twin Towers?
---
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 the possible downfall of Dick Cheney, although it never happened.
> In 2006 Congress passed the Military Commissions Act, essentially authorizing the president to do what he had been doing with detention policy at Guantánamo. The Supreme Court had struck his detention policy down a couple times, instructing him to go to Congress before he continued on his extraordinary course. He did so, and the Republican Congress rubberstamped one of the greatest erosions of habeas corpus in American history.
> In was also in 2006 that we saw the last gasp of hope that the post-9/11 flurry of statism and war would take a step back due to a shake-up of the establishment, the last hint that the neocon stampede toward totalitarianism was something of an aberration. The Democrats won Congress that November, in many cases running against the Republicans' record on war and civil liberties. But in 2007 the betrayal became clear. The Democrats came to power and continued to finance the wars enthusiastically, no strings attached. Bush was rewarded for his warrantless wiretapping with the passage of the Protect America Act of 2007.
> Americans were particularly tired of the Iraq war, and so Bush and co. responded throughout 2007 with "the surge" – a ridiculous strategy that "worked" in quelling violence mostly due to bribery and the fact that the Iraqi civil war sparked by the U.S. invasion was finally ending. Yet the American people came to see this policy as a huge success, the lesson being that when a U.S. war isn't doing so well, the answer is indeed to step up the killing.
> In the 2008 campaign season, thanks especially to Ron Paul, there was some serious talk about the problems with America's policy of permanent, mindless war. In particular, for the first time since 2001 Americans heard the dispassionate suggestion that perhaps Americans are attacked because the U.S. government bombs, invades, and occupies foreign countries; and bribes, props up, and overthrows foreign regimes. Bush had gotten away with this preposterous propaganda that 9/11 had awoken a sleeping giant, rather than being a painful but relatively small hornet bite resulting from the giant actively stamping on nests all day and night.
> Yet the elections also marked the Republicans' and mainstream conservative movement's final consummation of their marriage to the warfare state. Celebrating imprisonment without trial became the measure of a good conservative. Movement conservatives questioned McCain's credentials because he had slight compunctions about torture. No longer could anyone pretend Bush was some kind of anomaly in his party.
> When the election came down to McCain and Obama, many saw in Obama some hope that on foreign policy and civil liberties we would finally see something resembling a return to normalcy. But Obama had already shown his hand, by voting to legalize warrantless wiretapping, calling the surge in Iraq a success "beyond our wildest dreams," and repeatedly promising to expand the war in Afghanistan.
> As president, in his first month, Obama gave a nod to civil libertarians with some executive orders shutting down black sites, suspending military commissions, and setting a schedule to close down Guantánamo. Two and a half years into his presidency, we see this was all a trick: Obama has completely entrenched the worst of Bush's policies into permanence. Warrantless wiretapping is the law of the land. Torturers are protected by the president; whistleblowers are jailed without charge. Indefinite detention without trial or meaningful habeas corpus review is bipartisan, official policy. The notion that the president can unilaterally declare someone an enemy combatant, even a U.S. citizen, and order him killed, is no longer very controversial, if it's even recognized. Obama signed the renewal to the Patriot Act without most people even taking notice.
> The president has also expanded the war on Afghanistan – the first major element to Bush's war on terror abroad – by about three-fold, with no end in sight. As for the doctrine that the president can decide to go to war with a country even without congressional approval or a clear threat to the United States, Obama did it without shame in Libya. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of corpses later, the war in Iraq continues, on much the same schedule as we might have expected from McCain. One of Obama's only crumbs thrown to the progressives who campaigned for him is the overturning of Don't Ask, Don't Tell – opening up the franchise for America's armies to wage pointless, aggressive wars.
> And the civil libertarian left's disapproval of the rapid disintegration of our constitutional rights? An indicator of the decline came last November, when most progressives sided with Big Brother against civil disobedience concerning the Transportation Security Administration. Created by Bush, the TSA has been one of the most insidious developments of the last decade, not just for its direct attack on our liberties but also for its transformative effect on our culture. Today's young Americans will grow up not remembering a time when being groped or irradiated by a federal official seemed the least bit unusual. The police-state regimentation at our airports foreshadows a frightening fascist trajectory in this nation. And although a Republican invention, birthed in the midst of left-liberals warning about the Bush administration's erosions of our civil liberties, it is now a bipartisan component of the state whose biggest defenders are now left-liberals condemning any who protested as rightwing Tea Party opponents of Obama.
> Along with all the restrictions on our rights and all the destructive wars (including ones in Pakistan, Yemen, and elsewhere of which Americans are virtually unaware), the post-9/11 atmosphere of statism has been characterized by a huge expansion of government generally. This often happens, as it did during Vietnam: Logrolling and political expediency make it harder for the opponents of big government at home to put up a fight when their commander in chief is sending the young out to die. And so in the wake of 9/11 we have seen the passage of Medicare Part D, great expansions of farm subsidies, the TARP bailout (itself coming in the midst of a financial crisis in no way mitigated by the war spending), and Obamacare. The federal government enforced martial law in New Orleans after Katrina, and there was hardly a peep of protest. U.S. drug policy has chewed up tens of thousands of lives in Mexico, which might be on the media's radar if not for the fog of war. The police at all levels of government have become increasingly belligerent, incompetent, and militaristic. The federal budget has doubled, from $1.9 trillion for fiscal year 2001 to $3.8 trillion ten years later. Even in the one-third of my life since 9/11 I have seen freedom in almost all quarters take a major hit.
> Garet Garrett referred to America's paradoxical "complex of fear and vaunting" – the U.S. empire's tendency to pump itself up as the greatest nation in the history of the world, dwarfing the mere mortal nations that dot the globe, only to shrink back into a state of hysteria, worried hopelessly that someone, somewhere, will destroy the country if not every precaution is taken. Both orientations, the hubris and the paranoia, make for a belligerent foreign policy and an unfree people, and Garrett's insight rings even truer today. Americans are so quick to pat themselves on the back for defeating the Taliban, or Saddam, or Gaddafi, or hearing that bin Laden was shot in the head as he stood unarmed. Yet we will take our shoes off at the airport and walk through an invasive pat-down procedure out of concern that the grandma at the next line over is really a terrorist. Americans see all motivation to hurt us as proof that we are the best, the freest, the bravest, the strongest, the invincible. Yet the prospect of some dictator without a navy flying balsa wood planes over and bombing us with anthrax will lure us into supporting a multi-trillion-dollar war that grinds up thousands of bodies.
> The decade since 9/11 is the real lost decade for America. We lost the chance to maintain relative peace and quiet in the years since the Cold War, respond to 9/11 sanely and thoughtfully, and spare trillions of dollars, many thousands of lives, and an immeasurable wealth of our liberties. The full opportunity cost of how the U.S. under both parties' leadership has responded to the events ten years ago is chilling even to ponder. The recession we still suffer could have possibly been avoided if ten years ago peace were chosen rather than war – a choice very few were willing to defend then, and too few are willing to consider today.
> We are still told that we can never revert back to our ways before that Tuesday morning one decade ago. Americans still romanticize that day. Left-liberals call it a squandered opportunity for thoughtful albeit forceful diplomacy and central planning. Conservatives join the September 12 Coalition, wanting to forever remember that blasted week when 90% of Americans thought the state and especially the president could do no wrong.
> For many years to come, Americans will ask one another: Where were you when the planes hit the Twin Towers? But I want to know, Where were you on September 10? I was watchingSpinal Tapwith my friends. And our state of mind – that pre-9/11 mentality, even in that naïve and isolated blur of college-aged frivolity – was certainly no less thoughtful or mature than the fear and vaunting that have characterized America's bloody and lost decade ever since.http://lewrockwell.com/gregory/gregory240.html

--
Thanks for being part of "PoliticalForum" at Google Groups.
For options & help see http://groups.google.com/group/PoliticalForum

* Visit our other community at http://www.PoliticalForum.com/
* It's active and moderated. Register and vote in our polls.
* Read the latest breaking news, and more.

**JP** Gradually replace NATO troops arrive in Libya to the Mujahideen

September 8, 2011, 18:38 ["Argumenty.ru," Alexander Grigoriev  Almost all foreign troops to be withdrawn in Libya places of permanent deployment this month. SAS Soldiers leave the country before the end of the week. There will also be revoked by the Foreign Legion and the Special Forces of Qatar and Saudi Arabia. The catalyst for the end of the intervention were the events in Benghazi. This is stated in the information "Argumenty.ru" received from the assistant Gaddafi, a former officer in the Soviet, then Russian special forces retired lieutenant colonel Elias Koreneva. "The withdrawal of foreign regular special forces recently compensated for a constant influx of militias, mainly from Afghanistan and Pakistan. According to our estimates, during the last week in Libya came about 3 thousand mujahideen, who received arms and military equipment in place. Mainly in Benghazi. There is the headquarters and stores of arms and military equipment jihadists. Then they fall under the operational command of the military governor of Tripoli, Abdel Hakim, Belhadj, who coordinates the work of "al Qaeda" on the territory of Libya. And replace regular army rebels on operational issues "- said in a statement Koreneva. "However, in the Benghazi, there are constant conflicts between regular armed units of NATO and the Mujahideen. According to information received from the city over the past few days during such collisions have been killed and executed about 27 soldiers of the coalition forces. In particular, four staff trainers U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. According to our data, the Italian Prime Minister Berlusconi has refused to send to Libya a few dozen soldiers of the 9th Parachute Regiment «COL MOSCHIN» as instructors, "- said a lieutenant colonel.

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google
Groups "JoinPakistan" group.
You all are invited to come and share your information with other group members.
To post to this group, send email to joinpakistan@googlegroups.com
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com.pk/group/joinpakistan?hl=en?hl=en
You can also visit our blog site : www.joinpakistan.blogspot.com &
on facebook http://www.facebook.com/pages/Join-Pakistan/125610937483197

9/11 and the National Security Scam

"Considering that all that spending was triggered by a ragtag group of airplane hijackers armed with box cutters on 9/11, something just doesn't add up. (Locks on flight-deck doors and armed pilots would have averted the attacks.) As Thomas Paine, the soul of the American Revolution, wrote in The Rights of Man about the British empire, "In reviewing the history of the English Government, its wars and its taxes, a bystander, not blinded by prejudice nor warped by interest, would declare that taxes were not raised to carry on wars, but that wars were raised to carry on taxes." "

9/11 and the National Security Scam
by Sheldon Richman, September 9, 2011

National security is a scam ­ an $8 trillion scam.

That's the amount spent since September 11, 2001, on the military, including the Iraq and Afghan wars, and "homeland security," according to Christopher Hellman of the National Priorities Project. If "veterans benefits, future costs for treating the war-wounded, and interest payments on war-related borrowing" are added, Hellman writes, the cost is much higher: $11 trillion, by the estimate of Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies. Hellman says by his reckoning, the full cost of "security" is $1.2 trillion a year.

And yet officials say Americans must not let down their guard. The mildest calls for cuts in the rate of growth in military spending are met with panic by "defense" officials.

Considering that all that spending was triggered by a ragtag group of airplane hijackers armed with box cutters on 9/11, something just doesn't add up. (Locks on flight-deck doors and armed pilots would have averted the attacks.) As Thomas Paine, the soul of the American Revolution, wrote in The Rights of Man about the British empire, "In reviewing the history of the English Government, its wars and its taxes, a bystander, not blinded by prejudice nor warped by interest, would declare that taxes were not raised to carry on wars, but that wars were raised to carry on taxes."

In America's case, however, it is debt, not explicit taxes, that was raised. On September 30, 2000, the national debt was $5.67 trillion. Today it is $14.7 trillion, a 160 percent increase. But debt could well represent future taxes or inflation, an implicit tax on cash balances ­ if the government thinks it can get away with it.

It is said that 9/11 changed everything, but in fact it changed nothing whatsoever. Opportunistic politicians simply used the attacks to do much more of what they had already been doing and were hoping to continue in greater measure. Admittedly they were good at that. The attacks gave them a unique chance to frighten Americans into acceding to whatever the ruling elite wanted. As a result, those trillions were spent with little real oversight ­ the overseers were part of the conspiracy against the taxpayers. Reports say that $60 billion in contract money for Iraq and Afghanistan has been diverted to unknown recipients. The Pentagon routinely loses track of billions of dollars.

The military-industrial complex has never been larger or more pervasive. Thousands of companies exist to sell expensive things to the government. Fortunes have been made. The post–9/11 period has been a feeding frenzy at the taxpayers' trough ­ grand larceny of historic proportions.

The attitude was well illustrated by Rep. James Clyburn, a South Carolina Progressive Democrat who worries that military spending might be cut because of concern about the budget deficit. Does he worry because he fears that security will diminish? No, he explained, he worries because he has military bases in his congressional district.

And people wonder why the economy is in a rut.

Of course, that is only part of the story. Monetary costs aside, the security fetish has cost Americans their privacy, turned the presidency into a virtual autocracy, and further blackened America's reputation abroad with civilian-killing drone attacks and house raids in the night. The image of the United States has been firmly set as The Invader and The Torturer.

But isn't all that, however regrettable, necessary because there are people out there who want to kill us? That's what the national-security elite would like you to think. We're told "they" attacked us because they hate our freedoms. If true, they must surely hate us a lot less now, thanks to the USA PATRIOT Act. Some say there is an intrinsic conflict between Islam and the West.

That's all self-serving nonsense. The 9/11 attacks were intended as retribution for decades of U.S. policy that has inflicted death and misery on Arabs through support for oppressive Middle East regimes and direct military and CIA operations. The attackers committed mass murder, to be sure, but Americans won't be safe if they don't comprehend the danger. U.S. foreign intervention provoked the attackers, and the U.S. response played into their hands by creating more people who seek vengeance and by bleeding Americans financially.

Wherever Osama bin Laden is now, I suspect he's laughing.

http://www.fff.org/comment/com1109j.asp

A Bloody Decade of Fear and Vaunting

A Bloody Decade of Fear and Vaunting
by Anthony Gregory

On 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 watched This Is Spinal Tap that 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 about the 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 9/11 was 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 the possible downfall of Dick Cheney, although it never happened.

In 2006 Congress passed the Military Commissions Act, essentially authorizing the president to do what he had been doing with detention policy at Guantánamo. The Supreme Court had struck his detention policy down a couple times, instructing him to go to Congress before he continued on his extraordinary course. He did so, and the Republican Congress rubberstamped one of the greatest erosions of habeas corpus in American history.

In was also in 2006 that we saw the last gasp of hope that the post-9/11 flurry of statism and war would take a step back due to a shake-up of the establishment, the last hint that the neocon stampede toward totalitarianism was something of an aberration. The Democrats won Congress that November, in many cases running against the Republicans' record on war and civil liberties. But in 2007 the betrayal became clear. The Democrats came to power and continued to finance the wars enthusiastically, no strings attached. Bush was rewarded for his warrantless wiretapping with the passage of the Protect America Act of 2007.

Americans were particularly tired of the Iraq war, and so Bush and co. responded throughout 2007 with "the surge" – a ridiculous strategy that "worked" in quelling violence mostly due to bribery and the fact that the Iraqi civil war sparked by the U.S. invasion was finally ending. Yet the American people came to see this policy as a huge success, the lesson being that when a U.S. war isn't doing so well, the answer is indeed to step up the killing.

In the 2008 campaign season, thanks especially to Ron Paul, there was some serious talk about the problems with America's policy of permanent, mindless war. In particular, for the first time since 2001 Americans heard the dispassionate suggestion that perhaps Americans are attacked because the U.S. government bombs, invades, and occupies foreign countries; and bribes, props up, and overthrows foreign regimes. Bush had gotten away with this preposterous propaganda that 9/11 had awoken a sleeping giant, rather than being a painful but relatively small hornet bite resulting from the giant actively stamping on nests all day and night.

Yet the elections also marked the Republicans' and mainstream conservative movement's final consummation of their marriage to the warfare state. Celebrating imprisonment without trial became the measure of a good conservative. Movement conservatives questioned McCain's credentials because he had slight compunctions about torture. No longer could anyone pretend Bush was some kind of anomaly in his party.

When the election came down to McCain and Obama, many saw in Obama some hope that on foreign policy and civil liberties we would finally see something resembling a return to normalcy. But Obama had already shown his hand, by voting to legalize warrantless wiretapping, calling the surge in Iraq a success "beyond our wildest dreams," and repeatedly promising to expand the war in Afghanistan.

As president, in his first month, Obama gave a nod to civil libertarians with some executive orders shutting down black sites, suspending military commissions, and setting a schedule to close down Guantánamo. Two and a half years into his presidency, we see this was all a trick: Obama has completely entrenched the worst of Bush's policies into permanence. Warrantless wiretapping is the law of the land. Torturers are protected by the president; whistleblowers are jailed without charge. Indefinite detention without trial or meaningful habeas corpus review is bipartisan, official policy. The notion that the president can unilaterally declare someone an enemy combatant, even a U.S. citizen, and order him killed, is no longer very controversial, if it's even recognized. Obama signed the renewal to the Patriot Act without most people even taking notice.

The president has also expanded the war on Afghanistan – the first major element to Bush's war on terror abroad – by about three-fold, with no end in sight. As for the doctrine that the president can decide to go to war with a country even without congressional approval or a clear threat to the United States, Obama did it without shame in Libya. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of corpses later, the war in Iraq continues, on much the same schedule as we might have expected from McCain. One of Obama's only crumbs thrown to the progressives who campaigned for him is the overturning of Don't Ask, Don't Tell – opening up the franchise for America's armies to wage pointless, aggressive wars.

And the civil libertarian left's disapproval of the rapid disintegration of our constitutional rights? An indicator of the decline came last November, when most progressives sided with Big Brother against civil disobedience concerning the Transportation Security Administration. Created by Bush, the TSA has been one of the most insidious developments of the last decade, not just for its direct attack on our liberties but also for its transformative effect on our culture. Today's young Americans will grow up not remembering a time when being groped or irradiated by a federal official seemed the least bit unusual. The police-state regimentation at our airports foreshadows a frightening fascist trajectory in this nation. And although a Republican invention, birthed in the midst of left-liberals warning about the Bush administration's erosions of our civil liberties, it is now a bipartisan component of the state whose biggest defenders are now left-liberals condemning any who protested as rightwing Tea Party opponents of Obama.

Along with all the restrictions on our rights and all the destructive wars (including ones in Pakistan, Yemen, and elsewhere of which Americans are virtually unaware), the post-9/11 atmosphere of statism has been characterized by a huge expansion of government generally. This often happens, as it did during Vietnam: Logrolling and political expediency make it harder for the opponents of big government at home to put up a fight when their commander in chief is sending the young out to die. And so in the wake of 9/11 we have seen the passage of Medicare Part D, great expansions of farm subsidies, the TARP bailout (itself coming in the midst of a financial crisis in no way mitigated by the war spending), and Obamacare. The federal government enforced martial law in New Orleans after Katrina, and there was hardly a peep of protest. U.S. drug policy has chewed up tens of thousands of lives in Mexico, which might be on the media's radar if not for the fog of war. The police at all levels of government have become increasingly belligerent, incompetent, and militaristic. The federal budget has doubled, from $1.9 trillion for fiscal year 2001 to $3.8 trillion ten years later. Even in the one-third of my life since 9/11 I have seen freedom in almost all quarters take a major hit.

Garet Garrett referred to America's paradoxical "complex of fear and vaunting" – the U.S. empire's tendency to pump itself up as the greatest nation in the history of the world, dwarfing the mere mortal nations that dot the globe, only to shrink back into a state of hysteria, worried hopelessly that someone, somewhere, will destroy the country if not every precaution is taken. Both orientations, the hubris and the paranoia, make for a belligerent foreign policy and an unfree people, and Garrett's insight rings even truer today. Americans are so quick to pat themselves on the back for defeating the Taliban, or Saddam, or Gaddafi, or hearing that bin Laden was shot in the head as he stood unarmed. Yet we will take our shoes off at the airport and walk through an invasive pat-down procedure out of concern that the grandma at the next line over is really a terrorist. Americans see all motivation to hurt us as proof that we are the best, the freest, the bravest, the strongest, the invincible. Yet the prospect of some dictator without a navy flying balsa wood planes over and bombing us with anthrax will lure us into supporting a multi-trillion-dollar war that grinds up thousands of bodies.

The decade since 9/11 is the real lost decade for America. We lost the chance to maintain relative peace and quiet in the years since the Cold War, respond to 9/11 sanely and thoughtfully, and spare trillions of dollars, many thousands of lives, and an immeasurable wealth of our liberties. The full opportunity cost of how the U.S. under both parties' leadership has responded to the events ten years ago is chilling even to ponder. The recession we still suffer could have possibly been avoided if ten years ago peace were chosen rather than war – a choice very few were willing to defend then, and too few are willing to consider today.

We are still told that we can never revert back to our ways before that Tuesday morning one decade ago. Americans still romanticize that day. Left-liberals call it a squandered opportunity for thoughtful albeit forceful diplomacy and central planning. Conservatives join the September 12 Coalition, wanting to forever remember that blasted week when 90% of Americans thought the state and especially the president could do no wrong.

For many years to come, Americans will ask one another: Where were you when the planes hit the Twin Towers? But I want to know, Where were you on September 10? I was watching Spinal Tap with my friends. And our state of mind – that pre-9/11 mentality, even in that naïve and isolated blur of college-aged frivolity – was certainly no less thoughtful or mature than the fear and vaunting that have characterized America's bloody and lost decade ever since.


http://lewrockwell.com/gregory/gregory240.html

Let’s Cancel 9/11

Tomgram: Engelhardt, Tear Down the Freedom Tower
Posted by Tom Engelhardt at 7:57am, September 8, 2011.

[Note to TomDispatch Readers: The remarkable Timothy MacBain's interview with me today marks the 100th he's done for TomDispatch.  He operates with little but his native intelligence, a great radio voice, and the most minimal of equipment.  It's a small miracle. To catch today's TomCast audio interview in which, among other things, I think back to the ways in which the original 9/11 rites and ceremonies led to this website, click here, or download it to your iPod here.  If you want to wander among the previous 99 interviews, click here.  Tom]

Let's Cancel 9/11
Bury the War State's Blank Check at Sea
By Tom Engelhardt

Let's bag it.

I'm talking about the tenth anniversary ceremonies for 9/11, and everything that goes with them: the solemn reading of the names of the dead, the tolling of bells, the honoring of first responders, the gathering of presidents, the dedication of the new memorial, the moments of silence.  The works.

Let's just can it all.  Shut down Ground Zero.  Lock out the tourists.  Close "Reflecting Absence," the memorial built in the "footprints" of the former towers with its grove of trees, giant pools, and multiple waterfalls before it can be unveiled this Sunday.  Discontinue work on the underground National September 11 Museum due to open in 2012.  Tear down the Freedom Tower (redubbed 1 World Trade Center after our "freedom" wars went awry), 102 stories of "the most expensive skyscraper ever constructed in the United States." ( Estimated price tag: $3.3 billion.)  Eliminate that still-being-constructed, hubris-filled 1,776 feet of building, planned in the heyday of George W. Bush and soaring into the Manhattan sky like a nyaah-nyaah invitation to future terrorists.  Dismantle the other three office towers being built there as part of an $11 billion government-sponsored construction program.  Let's get rid of it all.   If we had wanted a memorial to 9/11, it would have been more appropriate to leave one of the giant shards of broken tower there untouched.

Ask yourself this: ten years into the post-9/11 era, haven't we had enough of ourselves?  If we have any respect for history or humanity or decency left, isn't it time to rip the Band-Aid off the wound, to remove 9/11 from our collective consciousness?  No more invocations of those attacks to explain otherwise inexplicable wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and our oh-so-global war on terror.  No more invocations of 9/11 to keep the Pentagon and the national security state flooded with money.  No more invocations of 9/11 to justify every encroachment on liberty, every new step in the surveillance of Americans, every advance in pat-downs and wand-downs and strip downs that keeps fear high and the homeland security state afloat.

The attacks of September 11, 2001 were in every sense abusive, horrific acts.  And the saddest thing is that the victims of those suicidal monstrosities have been misused here ever since under the guise of pious remembrance.  This country has become dependent on the dead of 9/11 -- who have no way of defending themselves against how they have been used -- as an all-purpose explanation for our own goodness and the horrors we've visited on others, for the many towers-worth of dead in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere whose blood is on our hands.

Isn't it finally time to go cold turkey?  To let go of the dead?  Why keep repeating our 9/11 mantra as if it were some kind of old-time religion, when we've proven that we, as a nation, can't handle it -- and worse yet, that we don't deserve it?

We would have been better off consigning our memories of 9/11 to oblivion, forgetting it all if only we could.  We can't, of course.  But we could stop the anniversary remembrances.  We could stop invoking 9/11 in every imaginable way so many years later.  We could stop using it to make ourselves feel like a far better country than we are.  We could, in short, leave the dead in peace and take a good, hard look at ourselves, the living, in the nearest mirror.


Ceremonies of Hubris

Within 24 hours of the attacks of September 11, 2001, the first newspaper had already labeled the site in New York as "Ground Zero."  If anyone needed a sign that we were about to run off the rails, as a misassessment of what had actually occurred that should have been enough.  Previously, the phrase "ground zero" had only one meaning: it was the spot where a nuclear explosion had occurred.

The facts of 9/11 are, in this sense, simple enough.  It was not a nuclear attack.  It was not apocalyptic.  The cloud of smoke where the towers stood was no mushroom cloud.  It was not potentially civilization ending.  It did not endanger the existence of our country -- or even of New York City.  Spectacular as it looked and staggering as the casualty figures were, the operation was hardly more technologically advanced than the failed attack on a single tower of the World Trade Center in 1993 by Islamists using a rented Ryder truck packed with explosives.

A second irreality went with the first.  Almost immediately, key Republicans like Senator John McCain, followed by George W. Bush, top figures in his administration, and soon after, in a drumbeat of agreement, the mainstream media declared that we were "at war." This was, Bush would say only three days after the attacks, "the first war of the twenty-first century."  Only problem: it wasn't.  Despite the screaming headlines, Ground Zero wasn't Pearl Harbor.  Al-Qaeda wasn't Japan, nor was it Nazi Germany.  It wasn't the Soviet Union.  It had no army, nor finances to speak of, and possessed no state (though it had the minimalist protection of a hapless government in Afghanistan, one of the most backward, poverty-stricken lands on the planet).

And yet -- another sign of where we were heading -- anyone who suggested that this wasn't war, that it was a criminal act and some sort of international police action was in order, was simply laughed (or derided or insulted) out of the American room.  And so the empire prepared to strike back (just as Osama bin Laden hoped it would) in an apocalyptic, planet-wide "war" for domination that masqueraded as a war for survival.

In the meantime, the populace was mustered through repetitive, nationwide 9/11 rites emphasizing that we Americans were the greatest victims, greatest survivors, and greatest dominators on planet Earth.  It was in this cause that the dead of 9/11 were turned into potent recruiting agents for a revitalized American way of war.

From all this, in the brief mission-accomplished months after Kabul and then Baghdad fell, American hubris seemed to know no bounds -- and it was this moment, not 9/11 itself, from which the true inspiration for the gargantuan "Freedom Tower" and the then- billion-dollar project for a memorial on the site of the New York attacks would materialize.  It was this sense of hubris that those gargantuan projects were intended to memorialize.

On the tenth anniversary of 9/11, for an imperial power that is distinctly tattered, visibly in decline, teetering at the edge of financial disaster, and battered by never-ending wars, political paralysis, terrible economic times, disintegrating infrastructure, and weird weather, all of this should be simple and obvious.  That it's not tells us much about the kind of shock therapy we still need.


Burying the Worst Urges in American Life

It's commonplace, even today, to speak of Ground Zero as " hallowed ground."  How untrue.  Ten years later, it is defiled ground and it's we who have defiled it.  It could have been different.  The 9/11 attacks could have been like the Blitz in London in World War II.  Something to remember forever with grim pride, stiff upper lip and all.

And if it were only the reactions of those in New York City that we had to remember, both the dead and the living, the first responders and the last responders, the people who created impromptu memorials to the dead and message centers for the missing in Manhattan, we might recall 9/11 with similar pride.  Generally speaking, New Yorkers were respectful, heartfelt, thoughtful, and not vengeful.  They didn't have prior plans that, on September 12, 2001, they were ready to rally those nearly 3,000 dead to support.  They weren't prepared at the moment of the catastrophe to -- as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld so classically said -- "Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not."

Unfortunately, they were not the measure of the moment.  As a result, the uses of 9/11 in the decade since have added up to a profile in cowardice, not courage, and if we let it be used that way in the next decade, we will go down in history as a nation of cowards.

There is little on this planet of the living more important, or more human, than the burial and remembrance of the dead.  Even Neanderthals buried their dead, possibly with flowers, and tens of thousands of years ago, the earliest humans, the Cro-Magnon, were already burying their dead elaborately, in one case in clothing onto which more than 3,000 ivory beads had been sewn, perhaps as objects of reverence and even remembrance.  Much of what we know of human prehistory and the earliest eras of our history comes from graves and tombs where the dead were provided for.

And surely it's our duty in this world of loss to remember the dead, those close to us and those more removed who mattered in our national or even planetary lives.  Many of those who loved and were close to the victims of 9/11 are undoubtedly attached to the yearly ceremonies that surround their deceased wives, husbands, lovers, children, mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters.  For the nightmare of 9/11, they deserve a memorial.  But we don't.

If September 11th was indeed a nightmare, 9/11 as a memorial and Ground Zero as a "consecrated" place have turned out to be a blank check for the American war state, funding an endless trip to hell.  They have helped lead us into fields of carnage that put the dead of 9/11 to shame.

Every dead person will, of course, be forgotten sooner or later, no matter how tightly we clasp their memories or what memorials we build.  In my mind, I have a private memorial to my own dead parents.  Whenever I leaf through my mother's childhood photo album and recognize just about no one but her among all the faces, however, I'm also aware that there is no one left on this planet to ask about any of them.  And when I die, my little memorial to them will go with me.

This will be the fate, sooner or later, of everyone who, on September 11, 2001, was murdered in those buildings in New York, in that field in Pennsylvania, and in the Pentagon, as well as those who sacrificed their lives in rescue attempts, or may now be dying as a result.  Under such circumstances, who would not want to remember them all in a special way?

It's a terrible thing to ask those still missing the dead of 9/11 to forgo the public spectacle that accompanies their memory, but worse is what we have: repeated solemn ceremonies to the ongoing health of the American war state and the wildest dreams of Osama bin Laden.

Memory is usually so important, but in this case we would have been better off with oblivion.  It's time to truly inter not the dead, but the worst urges in American life since 9/11 and the ceremonies which, for a decade, have gone with them.  Better to bury all of that at sea with bin Laden and then mourn the dead, each in our own way, in silence and, above all, in peace.



Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's as well as The End of Victory Culture, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book, The United States of Fear (Haymarket Books), will be published in November. To listen to Timothy MacBain's 100th Tomcast interview in which I discuss the role that the original 9/11 ceremonies played in the creation of TomDispatch.com click here, or download it to your iPod here.


[Note on further reading: I recommend two recent pieces that, amid the mountain of usual writing about 9/11 ten years later, have something out of the ordinary to say: Ariel Dorfman's " Epitaph for Another September 11" in the Nation magazine on the two 9/11s and how differently two American nations reacted to their disasters, and Lawrence Weschler's " Memory" in the Chronicle of Higher Education on the shame of a squandered decade.]

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175437/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_tear_down_the_freedom_tower/