Nine Eleven 2007

Posted on September 11, 2007 in Occupation of Iraq

UPDATED AND REVISED

NEWS FLASH: Osama Bin Laden is still alive and free.

What happened on Sept. 11, 2001, was extraordinary and horrible by any measure. And certainly a crime against humanity. At the same time, it was a grisly addition to a history of human experience that has often included many thousands killed, en masse, by inhuman human choice. It is simply and complexly a factual matter that the U.S. government has participated in outright mass murders directly — in, for example, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Panama, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq — and less directly, through aid to armies terrorizing civilians in Nicaragua, Angola, East Timor and many other countries.

The news media claim to be providing context. But whose? Overall, the context of Uncle Sam in the more perverse and narcissistic aspects of his policy personality. The hypocrisies of claims about moral precepts and universal principles go beyond the mere insistence that some others “do as we say, not as we do.” What gets said, repeated and forgotten sets up kaleidoscope patterns that can be adjusted to serve the self-centered mega-institutions reliably fixated on maintaining their own dominance.

Media manifestations of these patterns are frequently a mess of contradictions so extreme that they can only be held together with the power of ownership, advertising and underwriting structures — along with notable assists from government agencies that dispense regulatory favors and myriad pressure to serve what might today be called a military-industrial-media complex. Our contact with the world is filtered through the mesh of mass media to such a great extent that the mesh itself becomes the fabric of power.

The most repetitious lessons of 9/11 — received and propagated by the vast preponderance of U.S. news media — have to do with the terribly asymmetrical importance of grief and of moral responsibility. Our nation is so righteous that we are trained to ask for whom the bell tolls. Rendered as implicitly divisible, humanity is fractionated as seen through red-white-and-blue windows on the world.

FAIR’s Norman Solomon on the legacy of 9/11

To those who, because of Nine Eleven, chose to support the War in Iraq even though there was absolutely no evidence of WMDs (the UN inspectors kept telling you that they weren’t there and you just thought they were on the side of Saddam Hussein) and who were afraid that they would be thought unpatriotic if they didn’t:

I TRIED to tell you, but you wouldn’t listen, would you? We had the moral high ground and now we’re running a recruitment agency for Al Qaeda. Because you let a war like this happen, you’re a bad American — until you make amends. Call the White House today and tell Bush to get the troops home. That’s your penance. (I’m letting you off easy.)

I saw the fraud for what it was in the first place. And took plenty of flack for it, too.

By sending Americans to kill Iraqis you in no way honored the memory of those who died. Instead, you showed that you could be panicked at the slightest inferrence of dispatriotism. The most important stands that we can take are for our values and no bomb, gun, or bayonet can protect those. We must use our voices and our votes.

Real Americans can say no to unnecessary and atrocious war. Say it now.