"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." - Tom Engelhardt ('Let's Cancel 9/11 and Bury the War State's Blank Check at Sea' at http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/tom-engelhardt/38315/lets-cancel-9-11-and-bury-the-war-states-blank-check-at-sea)
Little did I realize that merely two years after living through the worst terror attack in the Western Hemisphere before 9/11, I'd be in another - while in London, in July, 1978 - when an IRA bomb strike left dozens dead or wounded. Indeed, the bloody images in The Guardian and Telegraph (including of Grenadier horses blown to bits) were enough to turn my stomach from eating any breakfast. I couldn't believe people could be so cowardly and bloodthirsty!
Earlier, much worse occurred in the island state of Barbados, on October 6, 1976, when Cubana Airlines Flight 455 was detonated over the island's territory with the loss of all 73 on board. This dastardly terror strike lives on in infamy in the minds of all who were there at the time, including me. (I had first arrived in Barbados in July, 1971 in Peace Corps, then after leaving my PC service in Aug. 1975, began work for the Ministry of Education in September the same year.)
Certainly the event is just as emblazoned in Barbadian neurons as the 9-11 attack for those in New York. Maybe worse since the scale of Barbados is radically smaller than New York, or the U.S. On a national scale of devastation, that Cubana Air bombing took out a percentage of people equal to 0.03% of the total populace, while numerically as a %, 9-11 took out roughly 0.0001%. Thus, in purely proportionate numerical terms, Cubana 455 was much deadlier. It was also personal for me, as I had to watch - on Paradise Beach - with my visiting nieces, as the hundreds of bloody body parts washed ashore. Terror was near and personal, not just some distant image on a TV screen.
My nieces, even now as adult women, are still traumatized by the event and have nightmares about the floating, bloody body parts. They also - when visiting Barbados (as in 2003)refused to go near that particular beach again. I believe they all suffer from post-traumatic stress syndrome because of it. For myself, I sometimes awaken in the dead of night following a dream of being on a blood-soaked beach littered with skulls, lacerated bowels, and human organs stretching as far as the eye can see. Fortunately, the nightmares have receded over the years.
Only in the aftermath, after years, did the information eventually surface that the terror strike was CIA-orchestrated, using a group of anti-Castro hirelings named Freddy Lugo, Hernan Ricardo, Orlando Bosch (of "Alpha 66" fame) and Luis Carriles Posada. Declassified U.S. documents show that soon after the Cubana plane was blown out of the sky on Oct. 6, 1976, the CIA, then under the direction of George H.W. Bush, identified Posada and Bosch as the masterminds of the bombing. But in the fall 1976, Bush’s boss, President Gerald Ford (the same Ford that fudged and altered JFK assassination wound placements), was in a tight election battle with Democrat Jimmy Carter and the Ford administration wanted to keep intelligence scandals out of the newspapers. So Bush and other officials kept the lid on the investigations to assist Ford. It didn’t work, of course, but that fell move assisted Posada later.
Despite this political setback , the facts were well known. According to a secret CIA cable dated Oct. 14, 1976, intelligence sources in Venezuela relayed information about the Cubana Airlines bombing that tied in Bosch, who had been visiting Venezuela, and Posada, who then served as a senior officer in Venezuela’s intelligence agency, DISIP. The Oct. 14 cable said Bosch arrived in Venezuela in late September 1976 under the protection of Venezuelan President Carlos Andres Perez, a close Washington ally who assigned his intelligence adviser Orlando Garcia “to protect and assist Bosch during his stay in Venezuela.”
On his arrival, Bosch was met by Garcia and Posada, according to the report. Later, a fundraising dinner was held in Bosch’s honor. “A few days following the fund-raising dinner, Posada was overheard to say that, ‘we are going to hit a Cuban airplane,’ and that ‘Orlando has the details,’” the CIA report said. Meanwhile, those of us living in Barbados had no remote notion of the bloody act to come, nor of the U.S. complicity in it. The CIA Report went on to read:
“Following the 6 October [1976] Cubana Airline crash off the coast of Barbados, Bosch, Garcia and Posada agreed that it would be best for Bosch to leave Venezuela. Therefore, on 9 October, Posada and Garcia escorted Bosch to the Colombian border, where he crossed into Colombian territory.”
Note there the sanitizing of the language- "crash" instead of bombing, or what we call "collateral language", which would be but a prelude to that employed by the power-lings and lackeys in the wake of 9-11, to get all on board with the security mindset and fear mongering. (The better to get the abominable Patriot Act passed, and launch invasions of Afganistan and Iraq later).
Meanwhile, Venezuelan police began rounding up suspects. Two Cuban exiles, Hernan Ricardo and Freddy Lugo, who got off the Cubana plane in Barbados, confessed that they had planted the bomb and they named Bosch and Posada as the architects of the attack. A search of Posada’s apartment in Venezuela turned up Cubana Airlines timetables and other incriminating documents. Alas, Posada never received the justice he deserved because numerous presidents chose to turn him loose, including one (George H.W. Bush) who actually issued a pardon.
So call me cynical when I hear or see all this mawkish, overblown remembrance crap about 9/11 when no one recalled or remembered those slain on 10-6-76! Also, call me cynical when it's obvious the current 9/11 events are largely based on processed PR to keep the American masses in the dark about what's happening right under their noses. (Including driving us off the cliff with monstrous deficits to fund an overblown military-war state that uses this 9/11 media obsession and hype like crack cocaine - see e.g. Peggy Noonan's blather in today's WSJ). Saturate them with all that teary-eyed victimhood, and make out like their country is white as the driven snow, and hey....tell them to go shopping at the malls (as Gee Dumbya Bush did) in the aftermath.
Lastly, spare me all the chest beating political rectitude when the nation that adopts it had allowed the previous most horrific terror attack to go unpunished, and the main perpetrators to receive comparable slaps on the wrists. "Oh, oh but many more were killed in 9/11!" Sorry, as I noted, in a proportionate sense, Barbados suffered much worse on 10-6-76 than the U.S. on 9-11-01.
In a September 13, 2001 interview with the magazine In These Times, Chalmers Johnson (the author of ‘Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire’) was said to “have seen the September 11 catastrophe coming”. Johnson’s 2000 book argued that U.S. interventionist foreign policy and military overextension would lead to unintended and unpredictable consequences, including "blowback" if it didn't desist. Those who would pay for its malignant policies and decisions, such as keeping American bases set up in Saudi Arabia following the 1990 Gulf War, would be innocent citizens, collateral victims. Just as traumatized Cubans and still PTSD-affected Bajans were collateral victims of the U.S. terror war against Castro's Cuba.
In the latter case, one could actually find - via Freedom of Information Act documents- evidence that from as far back as 1962 the U.S. wanted to perpetrate strikes on innocents to try and justify a war against Cuba. Two pages of those (now) declassified documents are posted here. There are more than ten in all, many of which later paved the way for the infamous "Operation Northwoods" which readers can google. Note the tactics include: blowing up ships in harbor, conducting funerals for 'mock victims', and using 'Remember the Maine' incidents that include "blowing up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay to blame Cuba".
The balmy piffle of airy-headed conspiracy theorists? Fuck NO! Actual text from propositions invoked in U.S. documents, and under the orders of Gen Edward Lansdale. Lansdale at the time was Director of the Pentagon's Office of Special Operations - the unit responsible for reporting to the NSA. (The same massive security outfit now sifting through all your emails, thanks to provisions in the Patriot Act).
This background is important, because without it one comes away with the erroneous notion that the U.S. is a goody two shoes country whose own butchery, terror, and wars of choice merit no consequences. We can do as we please, because we're "God's gift to the planet". But many, even in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, never saw it that way and indeed, saw the attacks as the ultimate end point for a behind the scenes, aggressive foreign policy that took no prisoners. The problem is most of these voices were shut up or suppressed in the "rah-rah" flag waving and pseudo patriotism that followed. Why "pseudo-patriotism"? Because if the event merited all the gravitas as had been portrayed, people: 1) would not have been told to go out and "shop" - as Bush Jr. told them, and 2) would have been informed they may have to pay higher taxes as costs to inflict harm on the enemy.
BushCo let citizens off the hook with (1) and omitting 2. (And Obama still hasn't allowed the Bush tax cuts to expire to at least pay for being in Afghanistan until 2014) Indeed, instead of demanding higher taxes to pay for the invasions and occupations that Bush knew were coming (the plans had been on the boards since before 1992 and would've been implemented had George Sr. been re-elected in '92), he allowed TWO massive tax cuts to go through. (Helped along by the pusillanimous, no-balls Dems, as usual. 12 Dem Senators voted for the first and most expensive tax cuts in 2001, instead of understanding the damage they would inflict on our deficits. Just as these morons extended the Bush tax cuts past their normal expiry date last December). So my point is the government then, just as now, was never serious - but merely crafted ways to justify parlaying tax money into funding a massive and abominable War-Security State. Thus blogger Tom Engelhardt's take (ibid.) is correct:
"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."
Beyond the contradictory moves to what was being mouthed, other aspects crept in, especially via collateral language. The idea was to forge a kind of "Newspeak" to drumbeat people into accepting the notion of a perpetual war on "terror". This way, immense defense budgets could be justified, with huge profits for the defense contractors. No surprise then that after 9/11 the Pentagon's budget doubled! It is now beyond the point of being cancerous (as NY Times columnist Frank Rich called it in a New Yorker piece) and is at risk of destroying the domestic security foundations even as it ramps up the yap about having to stay in Afghanistan until the last dog is hung....and oh yes, we must also build those 2,443 F-35s at a cost of a third of a billion (on paper).
Anyway, the authors of Collateral Language: A Users’ Guide to America’s New War (2002), note the purpose of collateral language is to pervert thought, more than enlighten or inform it. This was accomplished in the early days following 9/11 via a plethora of related terms including "axis of evil", 9/11 as an "Act of war", the "war on terror" and "terrorist" itself (which definition is so wide open that virtually any opponent of gov't policy, or even an environmental protestor can now be labeled so). The authors' concern was that as we yield and submit to the phony gravitas and meaning in those euphemisms and bogus terms, we surrender the independence of uniqueness and our thoughts, and thereby allow them to be forged and crafted by others, and hence permit the manipulation of our consent. Once we permit manipulation of consent, it's game over. We have become like beaten whelps towing the party line and could as well be automatons.
This was horrifically demonstrated in the run up to the Iraq invasion on March, 15, 2003, with months of brow beating by the corporate media, following orders from the Bushites, that Saddam had those terrible WMDs, and after all, they did find "yellow cake from Nigeria" didn't they? I wrote down and noted that as of Oct., 2002, 65% of Americans had been against invasion, but this had turned to 83% for by early March. Game fucking over.
The molding of language is important, because it helps to mold thought. By molding thought, the architects of current 'acceptable' language also are able to pre-emptively exclude certain issues, and protests or make their exercise much more difficult. Even today, with the tenth anniversary of 9/11 upon us, coming out against the homogenized thought reflexes of investing more victimhood and defense-mindedness is viewed as gauche, if not traitorous. We must all think alike, the story line goes, we were struck as a nation and must all feel the same grief. Well, maybe, when those poor souls blown up over Barbados receive the same!
The "freedom" line or worse, "them terrorists hate us for our freedoms" is the most pathetic codswallop. Especially given that in the wake of the security and 4th amendment violations following 9/11, most Americans couldn't even name three of the Bill of Rights. Well, no surprise because rights tend to vanish when left unused, just like muscles! Let's also bear in mind what this abandonment of conceptual rights led to: in the same aftermath the UK and the U.S. both abandoned the criminal model of justice and instead adopted brutal, fascist methods more comon to Nazi Germany. Namely using "extraordinary rendering" whereby terror suspects were abducted, sedated, blindfolded and shackled before being put on a plane to Egypt or Syria for interrogation and torture.
Again Engelhardt's take is spot on:
"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."
So long as the War state collects blank checks at the expense of our real (or feigned) sorrow and victimhood, we are the real victims of this whole sordid process. Year after year we are coughing up more of our domestic blood and treasure for "wars" that can never be won, even as millions of our own languish without enough food, or shelter. And who now, because of that selfsame war spending, stand to have their remaining benefits and meager supports cut (as John Kyl the AZ Asshole put it - as one of the Super Committee of 12, he will leave the committee before allowing any cuts beyond $350 b over ten yrs. for the Pentagon! When it ought to he $450b A YEAR! Well don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out, Kyl, you fuckin' SOB!)
Little did I realize that merely two years after living through the worst terror attack in the Western Hemisphere before 9/11, I'd be in another - while in London, in July, 1978 - when an IRA bomb strike left dozens dead or wounded. Indeed, the bloody images in The Guardian and Telegraph (including of Grenadier horses blown to bits) were enough to turn my stomach from eating any breakfast. I couldn't believe people could be so cowardly and bloodthirsty!
Earlier, much worse occurred in the island state of Barbados, on October 6, 1976, when Cubana Airlines Flight 455 was detonated over the island's territory with the loss of all 73 on board. This dastardly terror strike lives on in infamy in the minds of all who were there at the time, including me. (I had first arrived in Barbados in July, 1971 in Peace Corps, then after leaving my PC service in Aug. 1975, began work for the Ministry of Education in September the same year.)
Certainly the event is just as emblazoned in Barbadian neurons as the 9-11 attack for those in New York. Maybe worse since the scale of Barbados is radically smaller than New York, or the U.S. On a national scale of devastation, that Cubana Air bombing took out a percentage of people equal to 0.03% of the total populace, while numerically as a %, 9-11 took out roughly 0.0001%. Thus, in purely proportionate numerical terms, Cubana 455 was much deadlier. It was also personal for me, as I had to watch - on Paradise Beach - with my visiting nieces, as the hundreds of bloody body parts washed ashore. Terror was near and personal, not just some distant image on a TV screen.
My nieces, even now as adult women, are still traumatized by the event and have nightmares about the floating, bloody body parts. They also - when visiting Barbados (as in 2003)refused to go near that particular beach again. I believe they all suffer from post-traumatic stress syndrome because of it. For myself, I sometimes awaken in the dead of night following a dream of being on a blood-soaked beach littered with skulls, lacerated bowels, and human organs stretching as far as the eye can see. Fortunately, the nightmares have receded over the years.
Only in the aftermath, after years, did the information eventually surface that the terror strike was CIA-orchestrated, using a group of anti-Castro hirelings named Freddy Lugo, Hernan Ricardo, Orlando Bosch (of "Alpha 66" fame) and Luis Carriles Posada. Declassified U.S. documents show that soon after the Cubana plane was blown out of the sky on Oct. 6, 1976, the CIA, then under the direction of George H.W. Bush, identified Posada and Bosch as the masterminds of the bombing. But in the fall 1976, Bush’s boss, President Gerald Ford (the same Ford that fudged and altered JFK assassination wound placements), was in a tight election battle with Democrat Jimmy Carter and the Ford administration wanted to keep intelligence scandals out of the newspapers. So Bush and other officials kept the lid on the investigations to assist Ford. It didn’t work, of course, but that fell move assisted Posada later.
Despite this political setback , the facts were well known. According to a secret CIA cable dated Oct. 14, 1976, intelligence sources in Venezuela relayed information about the Cubana Airlines bombing that tied in Bosch, who had been visiting Venezuela, and Posada, who then served as a senior officer in Venezuela’s intelligence agency, DISIP. The Oct. 14 cable said Bosch arrived in Venezuela in late September 1976 under the protection of Venezuelan President Carlos Andres Perez, a close Washington ally who assigned his intelligence adviser Orlando Garcia “to protect and assist Bosch during his stay in Venezuela.”
On his arrival, Bosch was met by Garcia and Posada, according to the report. Later, a fundraising dinner was held in Bosch’s honor. “A few days following the fund-raising dinner, Posada was overheard to say that, ‘we are going to hit a Cuban airplane,’ and that ‘Orlando has the details,’” the CIA report said. Meanwhile, those of us living in Barbados had no remote notion of the bloody act to come, nor of the U.S. complicity in it. The CIA Report went on to read:
“Following the 6 October [1976] Cubana Airline crash off the coast of Barbados, Bosch, Garcia and Posada agreed that it would be best for Bosch to leave Venezuela. Therefore, on 9 October, Posada and Garcia escorted Bosch to the Colombian border, where he crossed into Colombian territory.”
Note there the sanitizing of the language- "crash" instead of bombing, or what we call "collateral language", which would be but a prelude to that employed by the power-lings and lackeys in the wake of 9-11, to get all on board with the security mindset and fear mongering. (The better to get the abominable Patriot Act passed, and launch invasions of Afganistan and Iraq later).
Meanwhile, Venezuelan police began rounding up suspects. Two Cuban exiles, Hernan Ricardo and Freddy Lugo, who got off the Cubana plane in Barbados, confessed that they had planted the bomb and they named Bosch and Posada as the architects of the attack. A search of Posada’s apartment in Venezuela turned up Cubana Airlines timetables and other incriminating documents. Alas, Posada never received the justice he deserved because numerous presidents chose to turn him loose, including one (George H.W. Bush) who actually issued a pardon.
So call me cynical when I hear or see all this mawkish, overblown remembrance crap about 9/11 when no one recalled or remembered those slain on 10-6-76! Also, call me cynical when it's obvious the current 9/11 events are largely based on processed PR to keep the American masses in the dark about what's happening right under their noses. (Including driving us off the cliff with monstrous deficits to fund an overblown military-war state that uses this 9/11 media obsession and hype like crack cocaine - see e.g. Peggy Noonan's blather in today's WSJ). Saturate them with all that teary-eyed victimhood, and make out like their country is white as the driven snow, and hey....tell them to go shopping at the malls (as Gee Dumbya Bush did) in the aftermath.
Lastly, spare me all the chest beating political rectitude when the nation that adopts it had allowed the previous most horrific terror attack to go unpunished, and the main perpetrators to receive comparable slaps on the wrists. "Oh, oh but many more were killed in 9/11!" Sorry, as I noted, in a proportionate sense, Barbados suffered much worse on 10-6-76 than the U.S. on 9-11-01.
In a September 13, 2001 interview with the magazine In These Times, Chalmers Johnson (the author of ‘Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire’) was said to “have seen the September 11 catastrophe coming”. Johnson’s 2000 book argued that U.S. interventionist foreign policy and military overextension would lead to unintended and unpredictable consequences, including "blowback" if it didn't desist. Those who would pay for its malignant policies and decisions, such as keeping American bases set up in Saudi Arabia following the 1990 Gulf War, would be innocent citizens, collateral victims. Just as traumatized Cubans and still PTSD-affected Bajans were collateral victims of the U.S. terror war against Castro's Cuba.
In the latter case, one could actually find - via Freedom of Information Act documents- evidence that from as far back as 1962 the U.S. wanted to perpetrate strikes on innocents to try and justify a war against Cuba. Two pages of those (now) declassified documents are posted here. There are more than ten in all, many of which later paved the way for the infamous "Operation Northwoods" which readers can google. Note the tactics include: blowing up ships in harbor, conducting funerals for 'mock victims', and using 'Remember the Maine' incidents that include "blowing up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay to blame Cuba".
The balmy piffle of airy-headed conspiracy theorists? Fuck NO! Actual text from propositions invoked in U.S. documents, and under the orders of Gen Edward Lansdale. Lansdale at the time was Director of the Pentagon's Office of Special Operations - the unit responsible for reporting to the NSA. (The same massive security outfit now sifting through all your emails, thanks to provisions in the Patriot Act).
This background is important, because without it one comes away with the erroneous notion that the U.S. is a goody two shoes country whose own butchery, terror, and wars of choice merit no consequences. We can do as we please, because we're "God's gift to the planet". But many, even in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, never saw it that way and indeed, saw the attacks as the ultimate end point for a behind the scenes, aggressive foreign policy that took no prisoners. The problem is most of these voices were shut up or suppressed in the "rah-rah" flag waving and pseudo patriotism that followed. Why "pseudo-patriotism"? Because if the event merited all the gravitas as had been portrayed, people: 1) would not have been told to go out and "shop" - as Bush Jr. told them, and 2) would have been informed they may have to pay higher taxes as costs to inflict harm on the enemy.
BushCo let citizens off the hook with (1) and omitting 2. (And Obama still hasn't allowed the Bush tax cuts to expire to at least pay for being in Afghanistan until 2014) Indeed, instead of demanding higher taxes to pay for the invasions and occupations that Bush knew were coming (the plans had been on the boards since before 1992 and would've been implemented had George Sr. been re-elected in '92), he allowed TWO massive tax cuts to go through. (Helped along by the pusillanimous, no-balls Dems, as usual. 12 Dem Senators voted for the first and most expensive tax cuts in 2001, instead of understanding the damage they would inflict on our deficits. Just as these morons extended the Bush tax cuts past their normal expiry date last December). So my point is the government then, just as now, was never serious - but merely crafted ways to justify parlaying tax money into funding a massive and abominable War-Security State. Thus blogger Tom Engelhardt's take (ibid.) is correct:
"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."
Beyond the contradictory moves to what was being mouthed, other aspects crept in, especially via collateral language. The idea was to forge a kind of "Newspeak" to drumbeat people into accepting the notion of a perpetual war on "terror". This way, immense defense budgets could be justified, with huge profits for the defense contractors. No surprise then that after 9/11 the Pentagon's budget doubled! It is now beyond the point of being cancerous (as NY Times columnist Frank Rich called it in a New Yorker piece) and is at risk of destroying the domestic security foundations even as it ramps up the yap about having to stay in Afghanistan until the last dog is hung....and oh yes, we must also build those 2,443 F-35s at a cost of a third of a billion (on paper).
Anyway, the authors of Collateral Language: A Users’ Guide to America’s New War (2002), note the purpose of collateral language is to pervert thought, more than enlighten or inform it. This was accomplished in the early days following 9/11 via a plethora of related terms including "axis of evil", 9/11 as an "Act of war", the "war on terror" and "terrorist" itself (which definition is so wide open that virtually any opponent of gov't policy, or even an environmental protestor can now be labeled so). The authors' concern was that as we yield and submit to the phony gravitas and meaning in those euphemisms and bogus terms, we surrender the independence of uniqueness and our thoughts, and thereby allow them to be forged and crafted by others, and hence permit the manipulation of our consent. Once we permit manipulation of consent, it's game over. We have become like beaten whelps towing the party line and could as well be automatons.
This was horrifically demonstrated in the run up to the Iraq invasion on March, 15, 2003, with months of brow beating by the corporate media, following orders from the Bushites, that Saddam had those terrible WMDs, and after all, they did find "yellow cake from Nigeria" didn't they? I wrote down and noted that as of Oct., 2002, 65% of Americans had been against invasion, but this had turned to 83% for by early March. Game fucking over.
The molding of language is important, because it helps to mold thought. By molding thought, the architects of current 'acceptable' language also are able to pre-emptively exclude certain issues, and protests or make their exercise much more difficult. Even today, with the tenth anniversary of 9/11 upon us, coming out against the homogenized thought reflexes of investing more victimhood and defense-mindedness is viewed as gauche, if not traitorous. We must all think alike, the story line goes, we were struck as a nation and must all feel the same grief. Well, maybe, when those poor souls blown up over Barbados receive the same!
The "freedom" line or worse, "them terrorists hate us for our freedoms" is the most pathetic codswallop. Especially given that in the wake of the security and 4th amendment violations following 9/11, most Americans couldn't even name three of the Bill of Rights. Well, no surprise because rights tend to vanish when left unused, just like muscles! Let's also bear in mind what this abandonment of conceptual rights led to: in the same aftermath the UK and the U.S. both abandoned the criminal model of justice and instead adopted brutal, fascist methods more comon to Nazi Germany. Namely using "extraordinary rendering" whereby terror suspects were abducted, sedated, blindfolded and shackled before being put on a plane to Egypt or Syria for interrogation and torture.
Again Engelhardt's take is spot on:
"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."
So long as the War state collects blank checks at the expense of our real (or feigned) sorrow and victimhood, we are the real victims of this whole sordid process. Year after year we are coughing up more of our domestic blood and treasure for "wars" that can never be won, even as millions of our own languish without enough food, or shelter. And who now, because of that selfsame war spending, stand to have their remaining benefits and meager supports cut (as John Kyl the AZ Asshole put it - as one of the Super Committee of 12, he will leave the committee before allowing any cuts beyond $350 b over ten yrs. for the Pentagon! When it ought to he $450b A YEAR! Well don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out, Kyl, you fuckin' SOB!)
Hell, the visiting firemen and other first responders and people who unselfishly showed up to dig out from the rubble of 9/11 still can't get the government to put cancers on the list for their compensation! (They're told there's "no evidence" of any "causal" cancer connections to the toxins.) Many suffer from terrible lung, gastric reflux and skin diseases, and can get no relief. Does money mean more than honoring their service? Sure as hell fucking seems so! But if that's so, why all the pie-eyed remembrances if we can't or won't assist the LIVING who need the help now!! Meanwhile the scumbag hedge funders, investment bankers and traders on Wall St. are making higher killings than ever, off the "dumb order flow", even when the DOW tanks as it did yesterday (by 304).
I defy anyone to convince me this country doesn't have all its priorities wrong, ass -backwards, and isn't using 9/11 to milk gullible citizens and taxpayers into the support of a perpetual war state, and maybe....maybe...I will drop my cynicism!
But don't hold your breath!
I defy anyone to convince me this country doesn't have all its priorities wrong, ass -backwards, and isn't using 9/11 to milk gullible citizens and taxpayers into the support of a perpetual war state, and maybe....maybe...I will drop my cynicism!
But don't hold your breath!
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