Guest essay by Ernest A. Canning
Irrespective of whether one accepts the government’s official explanation or one of the multiple “inside job/false-flag” theories advanced by the “9/11 Truth” movement, or even if you simply regard the current state of public information about 9/11 to be inadequate to arrive at any hard-and-fast conclusions about that seminal event, the mere mention of it evokes the word “terror” in some way for all Americans.
But the word “terror” is rarely applied to Donald Rumsfeld’s “shock and awe” assaults on the city of Fallujah. Why?…
‘Terrorism’ and ‘State Terrorism’ defy definition
When Eqbal Ahmad said “The terrorist of yesterday becomes the hero of today, and the hero of yesterday becomes the terrorist of today,” in his lecture, “Terrorism, Theirs and Ours,” he was referencing, among other issues, the transition of the Afghan Mujahideen, once described by President Reagan as the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers, into Osama Bin Laden’s al Qaeda, and the fact that Menachem Begin, at one time officially listed as a “terrorist” by the British, emerged as the Prime Minister of Israel.
As recognized by Wikipedia, the “politically and emotionally charged” word “terrorism” has no internationally agreed upon definition.
“Terrorism” is frequently applied by governments and by the corporate media to “guerrilla warfare,” which is the traditional response of a weaker opponent who tactically seeks out soft targets rather than frontal military assault, e.g. the French Resistance fighters whom the Nazis referred to as “terrorists.”
The concept of “state terrorism” is likewise controversial.
As noted by Michael Stohl, a terrorism scholar quoted by Wikipedia:
Perception of terror depends on point of view
9/11 was sudden; unexpected. Thanks to the immediacy of television, the images of planes striking buildings, jet fuel explosions, people leaping to their deaths, the collapse of the massive buildings, official confusion, and dust-covered civilians running for their lives, all of us were in a position to not merely see but experience the trauma.
That immediacy is nowhere to be found when we, a nation possessing the most powerful arsenal ever assembled, inflict terror on others.
There is a significant difference between how war is seen through the camera lens of a “smart bomb” and from the point of view of those upon whom the bombs are falling.
The deadly aerial assaults on Baghdad during Gulf War I and at the outset of the 2003 invasion of Iraq were depicted as surreal, florescent green over black light shows on CNN, Fox and MSNBC, who, acting as cheerleaders, did so over displays of “Countdown Iraq,” “SHOWDOWN IRAQ,” and “Target Iraq” plastered on their screens nonstop. But those images did not begin to display a brutal reality that is apparent only to those of us who have had the misfortune to serve in combat.
Viewed from a safe distance, even graphic images of war fail to reveal what Chris Hedges, in War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, describes as the critical element — fear:
State terror and Fallujah
In “This Is Our Guernica,” independent journalist, Dahr Jamail, along with The Guardian’s Jonathan Steele wrote:
In November 2004 the United States laid siege to the City of Fallujah, an Iraqi town about the size of Cincinnati — the second such siege in seven months. The city was sealed off to relief workers and un-embedded reporters. While the American forces contend that a large insurgent force was trapped inside, a significant question exists as to whether most of the insurgents had fled the city in advance of the deadly assault — an assault which Jamail contends resulted in the massacre of between 4,000 and 6,000 civilians.
Ali Fadhil, one of the first independent journalists permitted to enter the city some two months after the siege had ended, noted how shocked he was by the devastation:
Mr. Fadhil claimed that those killed were mostly civilians:
Dahr Jamail’s comparison of Fallujah to Guernica is both troubling and exceedingly poignant.
As Chalmers Johnson recounted in The Sorrows of Empire, “Guernica, a small Basque village in northern Spain, was the site Adolf Hitler [then allied with Francisco Franco] chose on April 27, 1937, to demonstrate his air force’s new high-explosive and incendiary bombs….The hamlet burned for three days, and sixteen hundred civilians were killed or wounded.”
The event’s modern significance is such that the United Nations prominently displays “a tapestry reproduction of Pablo Picasso’s Guernica,” a “depiction of the atrocity,” which Chalmers Johnson informs us, “is perhaps modern art’s most powerful anti-war statement” — so powerful that the U.S. government took pains to cover the tapestry reproduction of Picasso’s Guernica with a large blue curtain in advance of the key pre-invasion address by then Secretary of State Collin Powell. Johnson notes that the “government decided…the carnage wrought by aerial bombing was an inappropriate backdrop for its secretary of state and its ambassador to the United Nations when they televised statements that might lead to the bombing of Iraqi cities.”
Prior to the first seige, in April 2004, Fallujah stood out as a symbol of the Iraqi resistance. It was the site where the four Blackwater mercenaries were killed and where their bodies were burned and left hanging on a bridge. Given the “shock and awe” mentality of the US military and especially Donald Rumsfeld, and considering the devastation that followed, there is every reason to believe that the US military and Rumsfeld had intended, by means of the two assaults on Fallujah, to apply such a deadly and massive display of force as to strike fear in the hearts of Iraqis everywhere: Resist and we will destroy you, your cities, your families.
The last thing a military bent on such a course would want is some independent, un-embedded journalist to, in the words of many Holocaust survivors, “bear witness;” to display the truth of the violent and bloody Fallujah assault for the entire world to see, especially since “collective punishment” and “the retributive destruction of cities in response to enemy actions” violate express provisions of the Geneva Convention.
Despite the best laid plans to seal off the city, a small team of brave journalists from al Jazeera, including correspondent Ahmed Mansur and cameraman Laith Mushtaq, found a way into the city where they remained, un-embedded for the duration of the first siege. On Feb. 22, 2006, the ghastly reality of the first Falluja seige was exposed as the two men discussed what they witnessed when interviewed on Democracy Now.
Mushtaq said:
Mushtaq spoke of a man named Hamudi, whose house had been bombed along with the entire neighborhood, “and they brought the corpses and bodies to the hospital,” where the scene was “like a sea of corpses…mostly children…. I was…forcing myself to take photographs, while I was at the same time crying.” Hamudi was the only survivor in his family. Mushtaq took pictures of Hamudi speaking to his infant son Ahmed, who was asleep with a toy car in his hand. “Half his head was gone…. I could not really find any one human being in one piece or intact…. It’s bombing of airplanes.”
Mansur said:
Did Bush want to kill the messenger?
The April 9 and 10, 2004, images broadcast over al Jazeera for all the world to see did not sit well with the U.S. military’s media minders. On April 11, General Mark Kimmit, a senior military spokesman for the US forces in Iraq, said, “The stations that are showing Americans intentionally killing women and children are not legitimate news sources. That is propaganda, and that is lies.” According to Mansur, General Kimmit singled him out by name for criticism. An al Jazeera colleague, Hamoud Krishen, then asked General Kimmit, “Ahmed Mansur only transfers pictures. Do pictures themselves lie…?” General Kimmit did not respond.
On April 15, 2004, when asked by a reporter if he could “definitely say that hundreds of women and children and innocent civilians have not been killed,” Rumsfeld replied, “I can definitively say that what al Jazeera is doing is vicious, inaccurate and inexcusable.”
April 16, 2004, was the day of a Bush-Blair summit. On November 22, 2005, the London tabloid Daily Mirror exposed the existence of a five-page memo stamped “Top Secret” which had found its way to the offices of former Labor MP Tony Clarke. According to the Daily Mirror account, the memo reflects that during the summit — a summit which took place one day after Rumsfeld’s “what al Jazeera is doing is vicious” diatribe — President Bush “made clear that he wanted to bomb al Jazeera in Qatar and elsewhere” and that Prime Minister “Blair replied that would cause a big problem. There’s no doubt what Bush wanted to do — and no doubt Blair didn’t want him to do it.”
The allegation, if true, merely underscores the length to which our leaders are prepared to go to insure that the truth remains concealed.
As Glenn Greenwald so aptly observed during his Dec. 31, 2009, appearance on Democracy Now, where we Americans assume we are better informed than Muslims whom we perceive as living in backward countries under the spell of religious fanaticism, the reverse is true. The people upon whom the bombs fall are well aware of the fact that “we routinely slaughter innocent men, women and children” — a basic reality that almost never appears in the U.S. corporate-owned media, according to Greenwald, who added:
Peace depends on our understanding their point of view
If we are to put an end to what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., described as the “madness,” the American public must, en masse, acquire the point of view of those upon whom the bombs are falling. For it is only by acquiring their point of view that Americans can appreciate and answer the poignant question posed by Greenwald and recounted by Brad Friedman as to the “why” growing numbers of Middle East residents just might be motivated to attack us. Without that understanding, peace will always remain beyond our grasp.
===
Ernest A. Canning has been an active member of the California state bar since 1977. Mr. Canning has received both undergraduate and graduate degrees in political science as well as a juris doctor. He is also a Vietnam vet (4th Infantry, Central Highlands 1968).
Again Ernest ….
GREAT PIECE!
Keep pounding the wall of ignorance with Truth…
How to break through the willful ignorance? As I’ve said before, we are up against a major, well-orchestrated, very effective psy-op — psychological operation.
“Deer Hunting with Jesus” by Joe Bageant is a fascinating book I recommend. I seem to be in accord with about 70% of it, which is a pretty high percentage for me. I’m about 2/3 of the way through it and still looking for the answer to the question of how to reach the people that need reaching. So far the answer seems to be to hang out in the local redneck bar and have a few brewskis with the factory workers.
However we do it, it seems fairly clear that appealing to their moral sense of right and wrong is not the way to go. I guess God’s will supercedes compassion and humanity.
I remember reading some of the horrific stories of Fallujah at the time: sniper rifle bullet holes in ambulance windshields; all men of fighting age considered to be the enemy whether they were or not; after a certain date/time, the city being sealed to those attempting to get out before the firestorm; horrible burns that could best be explained by napalm and/or white phosphorus — these are the ones I remember off the top of my head.
The stories are out there and they have been out there since the rape of Fallujah. Why is it that we are the only ones who will read them?
To possibly answer my own question: The authors and eyewitnesses and their stories have been demonized, marginalized, and sanitized. The rabid religious right tells their followers that the patriotic thing to do is to support our (past)president (and prevent our current president from caving) in ridding the world of terrorists, and anyone who tries to tell you different is a _______ (fascist, commie, atheist, pervert, traitor, homosexual, etc.).
Anyone who tries to tell or show that Americans murdered and brutalized innocents ought to be waterboarded and is too repulsive to appreciate the sacrifice our armed forces have made to make our country safe for idiot brainwashed liberals like you to be able to spew that nonsense whenever and wherever you please, like on the liberal media that is trying to bring down our great country.
So….I dunno, maybe it’s Miller time.
Ernest what you write is appalling in its accuracy. And it will never stop ,why would Americans care as long you are the ones doing the killing.Even before 911 America killed citizens in countless foreign countries from South America ,Africa ,Asia,the Balkans and the Middle East .You currently fund and have funded for 60 + years the genocide committed by the Israeli’s against the Palestinians .Gaza Ghetto is here NOW and America ignores it even as Israel give Obama the bird when he says STOP THE SETTLEMENTS and you keep giving them billions as your own people lose their homes.And your Congress people invested over 198 million dollars OF THEIR OWN MONEY in companies engaged in Americas current war of choice.And them there’s your wonderful Blackwater/XE ,the last time I looked mercenaries where illegal.
Fuck I wish I could “unlearn” some of the shit I’ve read on the net in the last ten years and I see nothing to give humanity hope. 911 wasn’t the start but it might bring about World War Three before the truth is known.
Thanks for writing this, Ernie! I agree, great piece.
To Lora,
This information may be out there but it is not obviously out there. I’ve never seen Dahr Jamail interviewed on a TV news show, have you? Not even on the Daily Show, Colbert, or Rachel Maddow. I can’t help but think that if his book–Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches From an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq–was more widely known it would have an effect on our group consciousness. Same thing with the Winter Soldiers. Unassailable witnesses giving heartbreaking, myth shattering testimony. But who’s heard them?
I don’t know what anyone else should do to solve or try to address this egregious truth/untruth divide that is such a powerful contributing force to our headlong rush towards oblivion. My personal tack is to–1. study hard to be continuously working towards a deeper understanding of personal, domestic, and world events. 2. study hard to understand the different frames presented for events that serve more to mislead than enlighten. 3. study hard to learn the alternatives that exist that can solve the various problems that appear so intractable but actually are not at all. 4. work hard at gaining deeper understanding of how people with different versions of reality make sense of things. 5. assimiliate all this info and find the bridges. 6. learn how to communicate in a way that validates truth and critiques untruth without making war.7. Look to speak truth in blogs, on sidewalks, at dinner, at parties, on stage. 8. Balance my quixotic attempts to change the world with music and dance.
There– a simple 8 step program. See, saving the world is four steps easier than saving an alcoholic. Piece o’ cake.
Excellent writing. On a side note, I am hoping this is the year that Bush administration war criminals like Rumsfeld are prosecuted in a world court as to not receive a Blackwater compensation package for the agenda of death to line their pockets. Thank you Earnest for describing this war on the people who live there.
Leaving out 911 truth findings and lies about Bin Laden and weapons of mass destruction, I will make the following apparent for the happy “we got Saddam” American.
In an effort by US government leaders to minimize acts of terror by specific political groups, said US leaders have decided to declare war and attack 2 countries who at no time carried out an act of war or declaration of war against the United States.
More outrageous is the fact that according to the official government story, the person committing the crime on the plane is from a different country that HAS NOT experienced the wrath of US bombs, invading forces, and subsequent occupation.
To break it down:
Reported terrorist from country A hijack’s US commercial jets on 9/11/2001.
US high command response: Bomb, attack, and occupy country B… and then also country C.
To recap: US Commander In Chief George Bush succeeded by Commander In Chief Barack Obama do not bomb, attack, and occupy, county A, the country of the reported hijackers BUT carry out acts of war and terror to different nations under the excuse that “intelligence” suspects that this group is operating within nation B and nation C.
Although there is no evidence that Country B and Country C governments and/or their people and citizens carried out the hijacking of the American commericial jets on 9/11/2001, WE HAVE GONE THERE AND KILLED THOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE IN BOTH COUNTRIES AND DESTROYED THEIR CITIES WITH OUR BOMBS.
We have turned their countries into war zones, admitting no error and still trying to claim victory.
The recent hijacker was not from YEMEN BUT YOU CAN BET YOUR ACE THAT THE US HAS FULLY CONSIDERED A FULL SCALE ASSAULT IN THE PENTAGON WAR ROOM.
Lastly, you cannot convert the Fox-loving Republithug who buys most every word of their bushit unless there is an eclipsing catastrophic event like a watershed moment causing light to escape from an otherwise black hole.
Some of these people are so close to getting the big picture but will be forever trapped in a hypnotized trance of sorts. Sort of a circular loop of television government lies and inbred hate that will forever keep thes people from applying simple deductive reasoning to justify their blind faith.
They might hate soft target Obama who openly supports the interests of the same Illuminati Bush group, although this just equates to vocally supporting any Republican party criminal in the next rigged US election. Ya fcking hoo!
re my own comment [#4]
(One of the things I’m learning(somewhat painfully and certainly slowly)here in Bradblogdinia is how easy it is to be imprecise. This makes me have even more respect for Brad, Glenn Greenwald, Ernest Canning, et al who write concisely, clearly, meaningfully, and frequently. They’re really artists at this.)
Clarification: Step 7, of my own personal 8 step program for saving myself and the world, may give a false impression. While I AM looking to speak truth, I am not out in the world constantly proselytizing or looking for the nearest soapbox. That would get old in a big fat hurry. You gotta know your audience, your own mood, and be respectful and appropriate. Going to see my representative in his office is different than running into a carpenter I don’t know on the street which is different than asking one question at a meet-the-candidate meeting which is different than dinner at Jo’s and Israel happens to come up in the conversation. Part of the challenge is being ready for whatever. I’m only sorta okay at this but am working on it. I am NOT out there stopping people as they get off the bus on Mass Ave during rush hour telling them they have no way of knowing if their vote is actually counted. Much as I’d like to.
Actually, David Lasagna, I was enamored with all of the eight steps you originally posted. Your step 7 is a variation of Amy Goodman’s admonition to “speak truth to power.”
For those readers who are not already aware of it, David is the one who provided a complete link to the entirety of Egbal Ahmad’s lecture on terrorism in a previous comment, which, for those interested in a full appreciation of this topic, is a must hear.
Thanks again, David.
It’s all about the media. A controlled media is the umbrella under which all this is allowed to happen. The top of the pyramid is the controlled media. If they don’t report it or they report it in a misleading way, it didn’t happen and you’re “nuts” if you say otherwise.
Some words have owners, and no matter who uses them they always serve the interests of their owners.
Some words are weapons and can only used in word games that are in fact actions in a war.
Some words are bent, the attributes that are associated with them are such that they are prefabricated parts for lies and those who use the words are unaware of this.
All the above apply to the words “terror” and “terrorism”. The dishonesty is in what they don’t cover, they never cover the actions of the agents of a state even though these actions induce terror and are meant to induce terror. When 4 NYPD plains clothes police pumped 19 bullets into Amadou Diallo while he was in front of his apartment building fumbling for his keys, this was not terrorism. It did in fact inflict terror on Blacks in the USA, the subsequent acquittal of the 4 police on charges of murder was a reinforcing act of terror. When Israel killed 1400 Gazans, most of them civilians this was not terror even though it had the effect of terrorizing as it was meant to do so. When the coalition of the willingly murderous inflicted “Shock and Awe” on Iraq that was not terrorism even though it caused terror as it was meant to do so. Also not terror is calling air strikes against Afghan wedding parties.
The words terror and terrorist can only ever be used against poor people who don’t have a state with an army with tanks, helicopter gunships and F16s. The words are weapons used by the USA, Israel and the UK and lately by Russia in the propaganda wars against the people whose resistance to oppression is to be delegitimized.
note to Ernest Canning re: comment #7–
Thank you for your kind words, Ernie. I can’t tell you how much the acknowledgments I get now again from the various actors here at Bradblogovia mean to me. I have spent years and years studying in my own private wilderness, occasionally alienating friends, family, and strangers. If you’re going to try to talk about strange unsettling subjects that run ever so strongly against prevailing wisdom currents you better have your conversational chops down and I didn’t. Now, finally, I feel like I’m coming together a bit in my efforts and the feeling of validation from comments like yours is just exquisite. Plus, I understand now why so many write about the importance of community. It really is an amazing, comforting, and stimulating experience.
note to self re: comment #6
Excellent. Writing about being imprecise I imprecisely self-referred to my own comment as #5 when it was actually #4.(‘Scuse me. Just tidying up.)
David (#4),
I also appreciate your 8 steps; they are similar to mine. After reading “Deerhunting with Jesus,” I might add a potential #9, Get to know, really know, the people whose attitudes you’d like to change. Build rapport. For my own counterpsyops point of view, I might also add #10 “know thine enemy” read the right-wing blogs, listen to right-wing talk radio, watch Fox Spews to truly understand what we are up against. Perhaps #11 — call out the disinformation at every point, something Bradblog does admirably, without turning off your audience by getting that fanatic gleam in your eye and talking at rather than listening to. And #12 — don’t hesitate to actively discredit and marginalize sources that are propaganda machines.
oops — 12 steps. Oh well.
I made myself a promise after 9/11 — to become informed rather than ignorant, so as to understand why and how the world operates and what motivates people to attack Americans and places in America. I have partially kept that promise. I am more informed and my eyes are opened wider than before. I know I have a ways to go.
It shouldn’t be forgotten that it was the Marines who went in to Fallujah. It was a morally challenged (way past challenged) Marine commander who told his brainwashed zombie killer Marine footsoldiers that the city was a rat’s nest.
We can’t disband the Marines as they should be and as the SS was — the Marines as a military branch are too popular in the U.S. But the officer corps should be cashiered and replaced with Army officers. To some this might not seem to be much of an improvement but the psycho culture of the Marines just has to go.
To wake up the sleeping masses, just keep repeating why sacrifice your boys’ and girls’ lives for Israel, why sacrifice your boys’ and girls’ lives for Israel. They see their children returning as the permanently walking wounded or not returning at all. There’s a pressure cooker building. We need to keep building up the pressure.
Blad (13)
Focusing blame on the Marines and their commander, you’re echoing the outcome of Abu Ghraib, where those ulitimately responsible for issuing the orders were absolved of all wrongdoing.
Good point though identifying the Marines as those responsible for
Just try to imagine the psychological damage done to the young kids tasked to do that. Their tenuous hold on sanity is forever broken.
One of the biggest contradictions of the war justification lie is the large and ever-growing percentage of returning soldiers with PTSD. Another is the large percentage of female soldiers who are raped by their own comrades-in-arms.
Big disconnect here between the noble cause of fighting terrorists and the damage done by being turned into a killing machine for someone’s vision of world domination.
This is a great piece except for the beginning – 9/11 wasn’t a terrorist attack – it was a false flag staged event now with peer review scientific proof of explosives set in the WTC. So soft peddling this fact and then going on to write about Iraq destroys the false logic for going into occupy Iraq.
Marzi says:
And I couldn’t agree more.
It’s a TRUTH EMERGENCY Ernest, Brad!
It may be too late before it is too soon!
Pretty much agree with #16 & #17.
Other than that a very good piece.
Re Comments 16, 17 & 18.
I think you missed the point. Irrespective of whether 9/11 was carried out solely by al Qaeda hijackers, solely by an inside cabal or as a combination of the two, 9/11 entailed an act of terrorism precisely because the target of 9/11 was not simply the people who were killed and the buildings but the psyche of the American people, which psyche was deeply wounded by the event.
So when the statement is made “9/11 wasn’t a terrorist attack” because the commenter believes 9/11 was solely carried out by insiders, this comment simply reflects a myopic view that accepts the notion that “terrorism” is something that only “they” do. It ignores the fact that even if the self-described “Truthers” are correct and 9/11 was an inside job, it still would qualify as an act of terrorism.
My piece was not intended to weigh in on the “who” or the “how” so much as it was designed to unveil the impact on perception by way of point of view — a point underscored by what I cut out in the interest of brevity but will now provide.
Previously cut segment
There was an immediacy to 9/11’s impact on our psyche, courtesy of what Marshall McLuhan described in his seminal work, Understanding Media as the manner in which television “enhances instant visual long-distance communication.”
As explained by George Lakoff in Don’t Think of an Elephant that immediacy was applied through visual metaphors, which “framed” our understanding of what took place on screen:
Per Lakoff, when we witnessed 9/11, we did not merely see buildings falling to the ground and crumbling. We saw ourselves falling and crumbling. In the minds of Americans, the trauma was not a one-time event. It was driven home with each televised replay.
The impact, especially in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, was profound. Fear of falling is primal. Survival is instinctual. A wounded collective national psyche was ripe for manipulation, which came by way of an Orwellian “War on Terror” — a phrase which, as observed by Norman Solomon in War Made Easy, involved much more than a simple contraction of the word “terrorism”:
The phrase “War on Terror” meets the classic definition of what George Orwell described in 1984 as “Newspeak” — that is a “medium of expression” that would not only lead Americans to adopt the administration’s worldview, but which tends to “make other modes of thought impossible.”
Of course, success of the Bush/Cheney cabal’s “Newspeak” was greatly aided by militarism and a dehumanized sense of fear and loathing for Arabs and Muslims, both of which are deeply embedded in American culture. It was also aided by a fear-driven desire to believe that our “leaders” would protect us.
We can look back now and chuckle at the cheesy effort to transform a dyslexic George W. Bush from the thunderstruck idiot who sat, dumbfounded and seemingly lost, listening to My Pet Goat, to the bold leader standing tall at Ground Zero, arm around a firefighter, bullhorn in hand, announcing that “the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.” But, at the time, most Americans, who were experiencing a collective form of PTSD, “wanted” to believe.
As observed by Johann Wolfgang Goethe, “We are never deceived. We deceive ourselves.”
With the passage of time and a return to some level of journalistic integrity, on Sept. 8, 2004 Dan Rather would expose this manufactured hero as a spoiled rich kid who evaded the war in Vietnam when his influential father pulled strings to get him into the Texas Air National Guard; who then went A.W.O.L. towards the end of that service — a 60 Minutes report broadcast by CBS which was not based on a forgery; the shrill blather that emerged from the hard-right echo chamber notwithstanding.
But, as Norman Solomon reports in War Made Easy, just six days after 9/11, this same Dan Rather told David Letterman: “George Bush is president. He makes the decisions … Wherever he wants me to line up, just tell me where. And he’ll make the call.”
This call for blind obedience was made against a backdrop of near continuous renditions of The Star Spangled Banner and America the Beautiful sung not only before sporting events but at half-time or the seventh-inning stretch, often beneath the roar of streaking F-16s — televised spectacles reminiscent of 1930s German torch-lit parades, with the American flag not merely appearing as newsroom backdrop but in pin form on the lapels of anchors, commentators and guests alike.
The severe psychic wound, magnified by a corporate-media supported culture of blind obedience, provided the ideal matrix to manipulate the public into accepting an irrational response — perpetual war which both enhances the chances of a future attack and exponentially expands profits for the military-industrial complex — as the only means by which to meet this “threat” to our security.
The depth of that psychic wound helps to explain why it was so easy for a sociopath like former Vice President Richard B. Cheney, and his minions, to play off the trauma inflicted by 9/11 — falsely linking Saddam Hussein not only to 9/11 and al Qaeda but to WMD and a potential future threat from that combination that could arrive in the form of a “mushroom cloud.” It also explains how, in spite of the passage of time, the government and the corporate media can still so easily conflate a relatively minor incident — the underwear bomber — into a major new threat so as to justify not only continuation but escalation of that irrational, “Global War on Terror.”
End of cut segment
I would add that the depth of emotion engendered by 9/11 can be seen in the irrational inability of some but not all of the “9/11 Truth” movement who insist on injecting their view of the cause of the event even where that cause has no bearing upon the article they are critiquing.
I, for one, fall into the category of individuals who feel that the state of public knowledge about that seminal event is insufficient to justify any hard-and-fast conclusions. There are huge holes to be found in the “official theory” but there are many gaping holes in many of the “insider/false flag” theories. There is a profound need for a full, fair and impartial investigation of the event, but, given that we can’t get the current administration to initiate a criminal investigation of those who tortured or Congress to so much as consider impeachment of a federal appellate judge who issued the torture memos, the odds are that we will never see that investigation during our life times.
In the meantime, we remain mired in an irrational, perpetual “global war on terror” which has vastly increased the money we pour into that black hole known as the “military-industrial complex,” states are going bankrupt, the economy is in the tank and people are dying or going bankrupt because of a corrupt, dysfunctional and deadly health care system. Less than 3,000 people died on 9/11. Nearly 45,000 Americans die each year simply because they are too poor to afford insurance. An estimated one million Iraqis have died as a result of our unprovoked war of aggression and occupation.
While it may come as a shock to some in the “9/11 Truth” movement, there are topics beyond the “who” and the “how” of 9/11 that are worthy of comment. Writing about those topics is not a “soft-sell.”
re comment #19
Go Ernie!! Nice response. I’m with you every step of the way here.
related topic–
Couple of great articles from Commondreams about Helen Thomas going off-script from the stenographers of the White House Press Corpse.
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/01/09-8 —Glenn Greenwald
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/01/09-1 —Ray McGovern
As Helen Thomas is the only person in the room actually doing her job, here’s the latest fantasy from The World According to Dave–
All the inactive, ineffective, dead members of the press corpse are fired. They are removed from positions of privilege and mandated to find working class work in restaurants and hospitals. They do not retain whatever health insurance they had.
Helen Thomas remains as the sole responsible human in the room, retaining her job cuz she’s actually doing it. She is joined on an interim basis by Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and Rachel Maddow as new members of the now revitalized White House Press Corps.
The nation, and more importantly prospective journalists, get to see what it looks and sounds like when a small group of people consistently speaks truth to power and asks meaningful, probing questions.
New members are admitted into the press corps after passing a rigorous integrity review supervised by Dennis Kucinich and Bernie Sanders. New members retain membership on condition of maintaining appropriate adversarial relationships with past, present, and future administrations.
[ed note: links fixed —99]
Much thanks 99. I thank you and my links thank you.
Well done, Ernie-
I can remember watching in horror the events of 9/11. It was a chaos I could not describe because you couldn’t tell where it was all coming from. Yet it must have been equally horrific for the innocent civilians during the “shock and awe” campaign in 2004. And the sad thing is they knew darn well who was attacking. I believe this was an equally dark day in American history.