Listen to a reading of this article: ❖ The mass media are churning out articles and news segments commemorating the 20th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, many of them featuring adoring retrospectives of their celebrity president's actions as a US senator that day. Biden's
Media blackout this weekend for me. If I have to listen to one more goddamned self-important propagandist (er, journalist) waxing on about what he or she was doing on 9-11, I'll break something. What they were doing was preparing to hail Bush the Daft as a "wartime president" and to celebrate that we'd finally gotten over our post-Vietnam squeamishness about "boots on the ground".
I had to turn off that Netflix doc when someone said, "...and the question on everyone's mind was, "why do they hate us so much"". No, it wasn't. Maybe some school children were asking that. But in the aftermath the questions I heard went more like, "if the hijackers were Saudis why are we fixing to attack Iraq?" and "didn't we fund the Taliban et al as "freedom fighters", and "what the fuck is wrong with giving Hans Blix another three fucking weeks to look for WMD?"
There was a lot of emotional manipulation. I got an in box full of death malice for suggesting that it would be great to arrest bin Laden and drag him into a downtown courtroom to hear thousands of murder charges read. Oh, no, we had to bomb shit and wipe 'em all out.
A traitor to torture -- Scheer Intelligence -- Five years after his ABC interview about CIA’s use of torture, narcissist St. Obama ordered persecution -- to protect his legacy
Host Robert Scheer hears from Kiriakou the inside story of how the torture program started as part of a cynical power struggle between the CIA and FBI, why torture does not save lives or secure better intelligence, and how, while the program was started under Republican President George W. Bush, it was a top appointee of President Obama (Obama’s favorite, John Brennan, himself a key architect of the torture program, who chose to prosecute him five years after his interviews with ABC which should have made him a national hero instead of a disgraced felon.
“There was no real reason Americans needed to respond to 9/11 with slobbering patriotism and the banging of war drums.” Rationally-speaking Caitlin is quite correct. But the invasion of Afghanistan was likely more about American exceptionalism. People have to die for a reason, and Americans could not confront that we likely brought 9/11 down on our own heads. Multinational CEOs knew that doing so would reflect on them and their businesses. Giving some Islamist fanatics a shellacking over women’s’ rights was an easy way to avoid owning up to our petroleum-smelling, heroin-laced past.
It is ironic even today that the MSM hammers the Taliban about the terrible restrictions on the self-actualization of women, yet never a peep about the same treatment of women in Saudi Arabia and other Middle East countries where they still treat women as chattel.
This perspective - the atrocities we've commited and will commit since then, vs. the single-day incident - is obvious. But damned if you can't impart this to people who love Trump or Biden or Obama or Bush.
Included in that "giant stain on our souls" , let's not forget how this shithouse of a country treated its 9-11 first-responders. Having interviewed 2 NYC cops and 2 firemen who were seriously injured by the toxicity during their rescue efforts, I feel competent to relate how badly our lawmakers screwed around their healthcare before finally offering help with 2011 legislation. Ten bloody years to assist the real heroes, even as we laud the fake ones --- the military murderers, who according to a Lancet study referenced by Physicians for Social Responsibility snuffed-out the lives of over a half-million Iraqis in the first 39 months of Shock Us Raw. This insane view on heroism hearkens back to the supposed heroics oh the US cavalry in the 19th century, murdering Indian women and children and celebrated as the heroes who "opened the West". The propaganda-merda is endless, desperately trying to buff the image of a fundamentally homicidal society. My short-term advice: Ignore mainstream media coverage of 9-11. The Times, the Guardian et al. will offer only the absurdidst view that US policy in the period 1945–2000 did nothing to merit the anger of militant groups in the Mideast, which is patently merda if one examines the history.
Caitlin is (my interpretation) a Jacksonian -strict non interventionist foreign policy. Andrew Jackson described an interventionist foreign policy as an act of treason against the American people. Government for and of the people - American people - no PAX americana. No intervention in Europe during the two world wars. This is my position.
As for 911, revenge is best served at the tip of a hellfire missile. Apparently there is an Israeli (unofficially) edict too kill at a 10 to 1 ratio. American revenge meted out at 100 to 1 could have reasonably satisfied the desire for revenge, provided ample deterrent and was achievable within the first two years - after that it was simply gratuitous killing and of course contractors lining their pockets.
Somebody had to pay for 911. The Taliban were perfect dupes. Saudi‘s are too important, it was a good decision and the action should’ve stopped after about two years.
I well recall the knee-jerk reaction received by anybody who pointed out, as Caitlin did here, that "The death and destruction visited upon Iraq alone dwarfs the 2,977 people killed on 9/11 by orders of magnitude," and that "this was true of the death and destruction the US had been inflicting on Iraq even before 9/11."
Any such effort to to point out reasons why 19 hijackers might be angry enough to take such action was immediately dismissed as "justification," as though pointing out cause and effect is the same as justification.
Whatever Americans do is unaccountable, because we wear white hats, and our intentions are always pure. That's why it's perfectly OK to kill women and children to protect their rights.
9/11 shocked me; but its response is what horrified me; I watched it unfold in real-time. All the manufactured frothing lather of self-righteous flag-waving calling for the deaths of unknowns in far-away places. Far too many signed up to do it, but isn't it always that way, and still is?; the irresponsible transfer of even more power to those who had just proven themselves unworthy of the power they'd already possessed; varnishing state bloodletting with the handy gloss of God belief; and most damaging and least patriotic of all -- the stifling of the critical brain, so essential to make something like representative democracy actually work.
9/11 cast a long shadow, from under which we have yet to emerge.
Media blackout this weekend for me. If I have to listen to one more goddamned self-important propagandist (er, journalist) waxing on about what he or she was doing on 9-11, I'll break something. What they were doing was preparing to hail Bush the Daft as a "wartime president" and to celebrate that we'd finally gotten over our post-Vietnam squeamishness about "boots on the ground".
I had to turn off that Netflix doc when someone said, "...and the question on everyone's mind was, "why do they hate us so much"". No, it wasn't. Maybe some school children were asking that. But in the aftermath the questions I heard went more like, "if the hijackers were Saudis why are we fixing to attack Iraq?" and "didn't we fund the Taliban et al as "freedom fighters", and "what the fuck is wrong with giving Hans Blix another three fucking weeks to look for WMD?"
There was a lot of emotional manipulation. I got an in box full of death malice for suggesting that it would be great to arrest bin Laden and drag him into a downtown courtroom to hear thousands of murder charges read. Oh, no, we had to bomb shit and wipe 'em all out.
A traitor to torture -- Scheer Intelligence -- Five years after his ABC interview about CIA’s use of torture, narcissist St. Obama ordered persecution -- to protect his legacy
Host Robert Scheer hears from Kiriakou the inside story of how the torture program started as part of a cynical power struggle between the CIA and FBI, why torture does not save lives or secure better intelligence, and how, while the program was started under Republican President George W. Bush, it was a top appointee of President Obama (Obama’s favorite, John Brennan, himself a key architect of the torture program, who chose to prosecute him five years after his interviews with ABC which should have made him a national hero instead of a disgraced felon.
Listen on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/scheer-intelligence/id1054586928?i=1000534891456
“There was no real reason Americans needed to respond to 9/11 with slobbering patriotism and the banging of war drums.” Rationally-speaking Caitlin is quite correct. But the invasion of Afghanistan was likely more about American exceptionalism. People have to die for a reason, and Americans could not confront that we likely brought 9/11 down on our own heads. Multinational CEOs knew that doing so would reflect on them and their businesses. Giving some Islamist fanatics a shellacking over women’s’ rights was an easy way to avoid owning up to our petroleum-smelling, heroin-laced past.
It is ironic even today that the MSM hammers the Taliban about the terrible restrictions on the self-actualization of women, yet never a peep about the same treatment of women in Saudi Arabia and other Middle East countries where they still treat women as chattel.
Thank you, Caitlin. These things need to be said, but very few people are saying them, and almost nobody (at least in the west) wants to hear them.
This perspective - the atrocities we've commited and will commit since then, vs. the single-day incident - is obvious. But damned if you can't impart this to people who love Trump or Biden or Obama or Bush.
Included in that "giant stain on our souls" , let's not forget how this shithouse of a country treated its 9-11 first-responders. Having interviewed 2 NYC cops and 2 firemen who were seriously injured by the toxicity during their rescue efforts, I feel competent to relate how badly our lawmakers screwed around their healthcare before finally offering help with 2011 legislation. Ten bloody years to assist the real heroes, even as we laud the fake ones --- the military murderers, who according to a Lancet study referenced by Physicians for Social Responsibility snuffed-out the lives of over a half-million Iraqis in the first 39 months of Shock Us Raw. This insane view on heroism hearkens back to the supposed heroics oh the US cavalry in the 19th century, murdering Indian women and children and celebrated as the heroes who "opened the West". The propaganda-merda is endless, desperately trying to buff the image of a fundamentally homicidal society. My short-term advice: Ignore mainstream media coverage of 9-11. The Times, the Guardian et al. will offer only the absurdidst view that US policy in the period 1945–2000 did nothing to merit the anger of militant groups in the Mideast, which is patently merda if one examines the history.
Not to be left out of the war effort: Wall Street and 9/11
https://imgur.com/a/oMnndjU
Caitlin is (my interpretation) a Jacksonian -strict non interventionist foreign policy. Andrew Jackson described an interventionist foreign policy as an act of treason against the American people. Government for and of the people - American people - no PAX americana. No intervention in Europe during the two world wars. This is my position.
As for 911, revenge is best served at the tip of a hellfire missile. Apparently there is an Israeli (unofficially) edict too kill at a 10 to 1 ratio. American revenge meted out at 100 to 1 could have reasonably satisfied the desire for revenge, provided ample deterrent and was achievable within the first two years - after that it was simply gratuitous killing and of course contractors lining their pockets.
Somebody had to pay for 911. The Taliban were perfect dupes. Saudi‘s are too important, it was a good decision and the action should’ve stopped after about two years.
I could have not said it better.
A hundred times yes and thank you
I well recall the knee-jerk reaction received by anybody who pointed out, as Caitlin did here, that "The death and destruction visited upon Iraq alone dwarfs the 2,977 people killed on 9/11 by orders of magnitude," and that "this was true of the death and destruction the US had been inflicting on Iraq even before 9/11."
Any such effort to to point out reasons why 19 hijackers might be angry enough to take such action was immediately dismissed as "justification," as though pointing out cause and effect is the same as justification.
Whatever Americans do is unaccountable, because we wear white hats, and our intentions are always pure. That's why it's perfectly OK to kill women and children to protect their rights.
Again, Caitlin: bullseye.
9/11 shocked me; but its response is what horrified me; I watched it unfold in real-time. All the manufactured frothing lather of self-righteous flag-waving calling for the deaths of unknowns in far-away places. Far too many signed up to do it, but isn't it always that way, and still is?; the irresponsible transfer of even more power to those who had just proven themselves unworthy of the power they'd already possessed; varnishing state bloodletting with the handy gloss of God belief; and most damaging and least patriotic of all -- the stifling of the critical brain, so essential to make something like representative democracy actually work.
9/11 cast a long shadow, from under which we have yet to emerge.