I remember when 9/11 happened. I was meeting a colleague and, upon leaving his office, we entered the street and a lady came running up the road; yelling about a plane hitting the Twin Towers. We looked at her with humor because it was hard to imagine that she was anything less than crazy. When I returned home however, I turned CNN on just in time to see the next plane hit. Like so many other Americans, I could feel only confusion and utter bewilderment at the events taking place before my eyes.
When first contemplating the incident, I had imagined that maybe the first plane was off course to JFK due to heavy fog or navigation problems which accounted for the misdirection. When the second plane appeared and slammed into the other tower though, it clicked in my mind that this was no accident: America was under attack.
I watched in horror as people clung to the sides of the towers trying to escape the smoke and flames. Some jumped to their deaths rather than suffer the agony of burning to death while others, as I can only imagine they did, prayed to God that they would be saved. I could only imagine the realization that must have been in the minds of these doomed individuals that they may soon die.
When the towers fell -- one and then the other -- I watched in awe. The hysteria was overwhelming. Policemen, fire fighters and civilians were trying to help but at the same time, trying to survive. The dust billowed through the streets, engulfing the city for hundreds of blocks in ashen death while people ran in fear with only the thought of survival burning through their minds like the fire that had brought death to so many others. Who could have done this was the only thought in my mind, as I am sure it was in the minds of those experiencing the madness, first hand.
I came to tears when I thought of the loss of life and how so many children and spouses were now without that special person of their lives. I suffered within while transcending into the roles of some of the people who so innocently suffered for this, but in the back of my mind I knew it was a counter-attack against our Global regime. I considered the utter devastation we had wrought on Baghdad after Iraq invaded Kuwait and how many people suffered there when we destroyed not two, but hundreds of buildings.
Timothy McVeigh popped into my head and I thought that maybe this was some Christian radical attack, an American freedom fighter plan or highjackers from the days of the Iran hostage situation and the Lockerby bombing surging back to reap some pseudo vengeance. When the news broke that it was Muslim radicals who took responsibility, I immediately thought that this was our payback for the criminal acts against Iraq in the years past. The news stations though, never told the story of that possibility nor did they ever let their blind followers believe this was anything but an unprovoked attack.
I thought about how we so viciously and indiscriminately killed civilians in Baghdad as part of the retribution erroneously wrought from Iraq's actions against Kuwait. How many people died over the several nights of our bombing there, do you think? Like the people clinging to furniture while the top floors fell down intact after the base blew out below, I contemplated those people who we bombed in Iraq. They did not ask for their homes and businesses to be destroyed the same as our citizens did not ask nor actively participate in the actions against which, the attackers were rebelling. Those innocents here and there, who had, and were about to, pay the ultimate price for our Government's arrogance, had no choice in the decisions which cost them and the families so much misery.
During and after the event of 9/11, popular media, driven to support their corporate sponsors and political affiliations, began to perpetuate the lie which was about to march this nation toward a devastating war effort. It was a given that they were not going to be anything less than supportive of the lie that was to become the greatest deception our government had ever told. It was then as it still remains to this day, that history was purposely lost in the melee of faux patriotism, xenophobia and purposeful misdirection that would come to signify and so terribly infect the policies and the conscience of this nation for the next 10 years.
As I have written previously in an article titled, "American Nationalism; Is Our Freedom Under Attack?" In 2004, the IISS reported that al-Qaeda's recruitment and fundraising efforts had been given a major boost by the U.S. invasion of Iraq. This was in addition to the numbers recruited and efforts taken that led to the 2001 attack on New York. In fact, prior to this date, the U.S. led an invasion in reaction to Iraq's attack on Kuwait even though U.S. Ambassador April Glaspie had all but given Iraq permission for the action.
With the assurance by U.S. politicians that the United States had no interest in the dispute with Kuwait, Iraq invaded on August 2, 1990. Some believe that the false assurance was deliberately given at the instruction of President George H.W. Bush to provoke a confrontation with Iraq. The details are revealed in Rodney Stich's Defrauding America.
Admitting for the first time that he ordered the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, Osama bin Laden said he did so because of injustices against the Lebanese and Palestinians by Israel and the United States. Those in charge of our defense budgets will have us all blindly believe it was just "an act of evil" without provocation and the reaction or if you will, continued storyline, of what was to become known as the Bush Doctrine, with policies delineated in a document, the National Security Strategy of the United States, published on September 17, 2002.
It all seemed to have started harmlessly enough. President Bush stood in front of the cameras trying to quell the fears of the people by declaring that those responsible would answer for this crime. Those still clinging to the illusion that was America waved their flags, sang their songs and gathered to reap revenge upon a foe they did not know. What Bush decided to do, instead of the just thing, instead of an action that would have been globally and diplomatically responsible, was breed anger against "those responsible" to justify an all-out war effort against an entire people rather than against the small group who were actually responsible.
By using catch phrases like "Weapons of Mass Destruction," the "Axis of Evil" as used by his father before him, and touting unlimited, indiscriminate retribution as "Patriotic", Bush convinced Congress and Americans that War was the only, true American action. Those who objected to this farce were immediately denounced as un-American to the point where no one dared stand against the brutal atrocities that America would thrust upon the Middle East during the next 10 years in the War on Terrorism.
Along with the rush to promulgate war against a nation that his father previously waged unsuccessfully, post 9/11 saw a series of Liberty smothering legislation enabled by faux patriotic hysteria that would set our Nation back to a time before our Liberty was so fiercely fought for: Back to a time when the lack of representation from the Oligarchs of Europe and the oppression of the people's rights prompted our forefathers and foremothers to leave Europe and found this great Land -- America.
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