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Articles : "War on Terror"Tragedy's Legacy
It evokes a tragedy that marks an epoch. From the outset, the warfare state has exploited “9/11,” a label at once too facile and too laden with historic weight — giving further power to the tacit political axiom that perception is reality.
Often it seems that media coverage is all about perception, especially when the underlying agendas are wired into huge profits and geopolitical leverage. If you associate a Big Mac or a Whopper with a happy meal or some other kind of great time, you’re more likely to buy it. If you connect 9/11 with a need for taking military action and curtailing civil liberties, you’re more likely to buy what the purveyors of war and authoritarian government have been selling for the past half-dozen years.
“Sept. 11 changed everything” became a sudden cliché in news media. Words are supposed to mean something, and those words were — and are — preposterous. They speak of a USA enthralled with itself while reducing the rest of the world (its oceans and valleys and mountains and peoples) to little more than an extensive mirror to help us reflect on our centrality to the world. In an individual, we call that narcissism. In the nexus of media and politics, all too often, it’s called “patriotism.”
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.
Posing outside cycles of violence and victims who victimize, the dominant vision of Pax Americana has no more use now than it did six years ago for W.H. Auden’s observation: “Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return.”
We ought to know. But we Americans are too smart for that.
The U.S. media tell us so.
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Norman Solomon’s new book Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America’s Warfare State has just come off the press. For more information, go to: www.MadeLoveGotWar.com.
Posted by anthony
Anthony Lappé is GNN's Executive Editor. He's written for The New York Times, Details, New York, Paper, The Fader and Vice, among many others. He has worked as a producer for MTV and Fuse. He is the co-author of GNN's True Lies and the producer of their Iraq doc,...
Former NYPD officer and WTC first responder Craig Bartmer speaks out;
“September 11th changed everything”
That is an extraordinary claim. I really don’t think most people understand what the word ‘everything’ means.
To mathematicians and people who work with logic, all that it takes to disprove the statement is to find one thing that has not changed.
If one little thing did not change, then ‘everything’ has not changed.
Before Sept. 11th one plus one equaled two.
After Sept. 11th one plus one equaled two.
This proves the ‘everything’ did not change. There are actually many more things that didn’t change: – The charge to mass ratio on the electron – Avagadro’s number – The gravitational constant – The speed of light in vacuum
As a matter of fact, in all of reality, most things were completely unchanged by the events of September 11th.
The universe is mind boggle-ingly huge.
It is true that some things did change: – The outpouring of charity and support for the families of the victims was unprecedented – Our willingness to support a an unjust war against a foe who was not involved with the attack on Sept. 11th. – Our willingness to give up our freedom and liberty for a promise of protection
One more thing that did not change on September 11th.
In 1994 Dick Cheney told us that invading Iraq and toppling Saddam Hussein would result in complete chaos and civil war.
September 11th did not change this fact.
Our troops are now mired in that chaos and civil war.
If he knew about the chaos and civil war, why did he say it would be easy?
“September 11th changed everything”
You now know that this statement is provably false.
Stating things that are false is called lying.
(Ps. bacchus, thank you for the link to that video. I found officer Bartmer’s statements to be some of the most reasoned I have heard. I am not a conspiracy theorist, but I am not satisfied with the results of the 9-11 report. I don’t think it was really a cover up, as much as I think our leadership feels that deciding on an answer and assigning blame is ‘for the greater good’. They aren’t interested in truth, as much as they are in coming to a decision so they can close a chapter of history. Its kind of like the mental gymnastics that fuels fundamentalists. Look the answer is here, on this piece of paper, do not question! quit looking further the answer has been determined.)
You now know that this statement is provably false. – Bill Maher agrees, and so do I.
the warfare state – is this a term you coined? I like it; it’s a bit like the welfare state wealthy middle class Canadians complain about. Can I use it?
Great article, and number6x, great comment.
much more 9-11 WTC first responder eyewitness testimony
“I went down to the scene and we set up headquarters at 75 Barkley Street, which was right there with the Police Commissioner, the Fire Commissioner, the Head of Emergency Management, and we were operating out of there when we were told that the World Trade Center was going to collapse. And it did collapse before we could actually get out of the building, so we were trapped in the building for 10, 15 minutes, and finally found an exit and got out, walked north, and took a lot of people with us.” – Rudy Giuliani, 9/11/01, describing the collapse of the first tower. Who told Rudy it was going to collapse?
Who told the BBC that WTC7 was going to collapse?
more on foreknowledge here
...if the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center had succeeded, “the resulting horror and chaos would have exceeded our ability to describe it. Such an act of catastrophic terrorism would be a watershed event in American history. It could involve loss of life and property unprecedented in peacetime and undermine America’s fundamental sense of security, as did the Soviet atomic bomb test in 1949. Like Pearl Harbor, the event would divide our past and future into a before and after. The United States might respond with draconian measures scaling back civil liberties, allowing wider surveillance of citizens, detention of suspects and use of deadly force. More violence could follow, either future terrorist attacks or U.S. counterattacks. Belatedly, Americans would judge their leaders negligent for not addressing terrorism more urgently.”
- Philip D. Zelikow, from Catastrophic Terrorism Foreign Affairs, Nov/Dec 1998; Zelikow was the Executive Director of the 9-11 Commission, coauthor of a book with Condoleeza Rice, principal member of G.W. Bush’s ‘transition team.’
more on Zelikow:
While at Harvard he worked with Ernest May and Richard Neustadt on the use, and misuse, of history in policymaking. They observed, as Zelikow noted in his own words, that “contemporary” history is “defined functionally by those critical people and events that go into forming the public’s presumptions about its immediate past. The idea of ‘public presumption’,” he explained, “is akin to William McNeill’s notion of ‘public myth’ but without the negative implication sometimes invoked by the word ‘myth.’ Such presumptions are beliefs (1) thought to be true (although not necessarily known to be true with certainty), and (2) shared in common within the relevant political community.”[1]”
Zelikow and May have also authored and sponsored scholarship on the relationship between intelligence analysis and policy decisions. Zelikow later helped found a research project to prepare and publish annotated transcripts of presidential recordings made secretly during the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations (see WhiteHouseTapes.org) and another project to strengthen oral history work on more recent administrations, with both these projects based at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center of Public Affairs.
In writing about the importance of beliefs about history, Zelikow has called attention to what he has called “‘searing’ or ‘molding’ events [that] take on ‘transcendent’ importance and, therefore, retain their power even as the experiencing generation passes from the scene. In the United States, beliefs about the formation of the nation and the Constitution remain powerful today, as do beliefs about slavery and the Civil War. World War II, Vietnam, and the civil rights struggle are more recent examples.” He has noted that “a history’s narrative power is typically linked to how readers relate to the actions of individuals in the history; if readers cannot make a connection to their own lives, then a history may fail to engage them at all.”[1]
from CBS NEWS
What would you do for $2,300,000,000,000??
(CBS) On Sept. 10, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld declared war. Not on foreign terrorists, “the adversary’s closer to home. It’s the Pentagon bureaucracy,” he said.
He said money wasted by the military poses a serious threat.
“In fact, it could be said it’s a matter of life and death,” he said.
Rumsfeld promised change but the next day – Sept. 11— the world changed and in the rush to fund the war on terrorism, the war on waste seems to have been forgotten.
Just last week President Bush announced, “my 2003 budget calls for more than $48 billion in new defense spending.”
More money for the Pentagon, CBS News Correspondent Vince Gonzales reports, while its own auditors admit the military cannot account for 25 percent of what it spends.
“According to some estimates we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions,” Rumsfeld admitted.
$2.3 trillion — that’s $8,000 for every man, woman and child in America. To understand how the Pentagon can lose track of trillions, consider the case of one military accountant who tried to find out what happened to a mere $300 million.
“We know it’s gone. But we don’t know what they spent it on,” said Jim Minnery, Defense Finance and Accounting Service.
Minnery, a former Marine turned whistle-blower, is risking his job by speaking out for the first time about the millions he noticed were missing from one defense agency’s balance sheets. Minnery tried to follow the money trail, even crisscrossing the country looking for records.
“The director looked at me and said ‘Why do you care about this stuff?’ It took me aback, you know? My supervisor asking me why I care about doing a good job,” said Minnery.
He was reassigned and says officials then covered up the problem by just writing it off.
“They have to cover it up,” he said. “That’s where the corruption comes in. They have to cover up the fact that they can’t do the job.”
The Pentagon’s Inspector General “partially substantiated” several of Minnery’s allegations but could not prove officials tried “to manipulate the financial statements.”
Twenty years ago, Department of Defense Analyst Franklin C. Spinney made headlines exposing what he calls the “accounting games.” He’s still there, and although he does not speak for the Pentagon, he believes the problem has gotten worse.
“Those numbers are pie in the sky. The books are cooked routinely year after year,” he said.
Another critic of Pentagon waste, Retired Vice Admiral Jack Shanahan, commanded the Navy’s 2nd Fleet the first time Donald Rumsfeld served as Defense Secretary, in 1976.
In his opinion, “With good financial oversight we could find $48 billion in loose change in that building, without having to hit the taxpayers.”
A man named Dov Zakheim, a dual Israeli/American citizen was the Pentagon Comptroller and CFO at the time of the $2.3 Trillion ‘misplacement.’ Dov Zakheim reportedly “was (is?) Corporate VP1 at System Planning Corporation, a major player in the “Homeland Security” industry. One of the products that SysPlan sells is the Command Transmitter System, a remote control system for planes, boats, missiles and other vehicles. It’s highly customizable and configurable to interface with an almost limitless number of vehicle types.” Zakheim is also co-author of the PNAC document ‘rebuilding America’s defenses’ which called for ‘a new Pearl Harbor’ to advance the radical transformation of America’s foreign policy and defense industry.
Ahh shit, I missed 911 without setting off fireworks..
Damn… well 912 is as good a day as ever.
9-11, Six Years Later
– By Paul Craig RobertsWhen faced with disturbing events, the Romans asked a question, “Cui bono?” Who benefits? This question was conspicuously absent from the official investigation.
Remembering The Atrocities Of 9/11 – 34 Years Ago
– By NY TransferSome of us have been marking the atrocities of September 11 for 34 years. On September 11, 1973, Nixon, Kissinger and their pals at ITT went beyond “making the Chilean economy scream” and enjoyed a full-blown military assault against Chile which began the bloody fascist coup there. Here is a very brief history of that September 11.