9/11: Twenty terrible years later
We should never forget the victims of 9/11, but we need also to see the perpetrators and victims beyond just what we're told by the establishment.
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| On this day, the CIA was looking at office space on the 78th floor but after careful analysis only the CIA is capable of, declined due to the poor views. Who's laughing now? What. Too soon? // photo by Beija |
There are a few moments in history where everyone in a country remembers exactly where they were, what they were doing, and what they were thinking that day. The quintessential moment for everyone old enough to remember it, in America, is 9/11. For myself, since the University of Oregon was on a quarter system, I had not yet gone back to campus. I had woken up extra early to send my dad to the airport that morning for his flight from San Francisco to Los Angeles on a business trip. I was still a bit bleary-eyed and not paying attention to the radio until my dad exclaimed "WHAT??" At that point, I realized the radio, fixed on a goofy morning radio show, was simply playing the news. A plane had flown into the Twin Towers. All flights were grounded. He called an audible with his coworkers and they rented a car instead. After dropping him off at the rental shop, I returned home and was glued to the TV for the rest of the day aside from a quick trip to the electronics store to buy a motherboard for a joint computer build I promised to do with a friend.
I didn't even think much about those who perpetrated the act that day. My thoughts were nearly purely dedicated to the people that lost their lives and loved ones that day. The emergency service responders who sacrificed so much to get as many people out of the burning buildings as possible. The absolute heroes of Flight 93.
Everything was shattered that day. The biggest political argument at the time, particularly at Oregon, Phil Knight's alma mater, was concerning Nike's alleged sweatshops and offshoring in general. There was also the controversy of the Democrats claiming the election results were rigged (funny, that). Those didn't seem like such a big deal afterward. I hadn't really thought too much about foreign policy then. It's not like high schools, at least the public high school I went to, taught a whole lot of current events. But by golly, I was able to recite the "To be or not to be" soliloquy.
Everything seemed pretty damned good up until that time. Nobody seemed to really make a big deal about the Clinton wars. We had just recovered from the dot com bust. It didn't seem like any of us really had a conception of what other countries really thought of us. In retrospect, the joke that Americans don't realize there are countries outside of the United States was kind of true.
The immediate aftermath was kind of a weird moment of solidarity for the United States. People seemed to just be nicer to each other afterward. Donations to emergency relief funds skyrocketed. The American Red Cross was getting so many blood donations that they couldn't keep up with the storage.
Like politicians always do during times of crisis, they started hoarding power for themselves, telling everyone that's what's needed to get the people responsible for this. A nation that was scared and thirsty for revenge wrote them a blank check and they've been cashing it ever since.
Congress almost immediately passed the Authorization for Use of Military Force, with the sole no vote coming from Barbara Lee, who only opposed it due to the wording, not the actual action it would set forth. Even Ron Paul, the politician with the most consistently libertarian voting record, voted for this AUMF, though he had proposed a far more narrowly defined AUMF the rest of Congress decided to ignore. But Lee wanted to insert a sunset clause and it was almost implemented in 2018 before the House Rules Committee killed it. To this day, the AUMF is still in effect and still being used to justify wars and genocide abroad for reasons completely divorced from the 9/11 attacks, despite Osama bin Laden being killed ten years ago.
In short order, George W. Bush utilized this bill to invade Afghanistan and drive out the Taliban, despite the Taliban offering to extradite Bin Laden. It took twenty years of fighting this meaningless and directionless war before the United States finally withdrew, tails tucked. More egregiously, Bush attempted to use the AUMF to justify a war against Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks. No problem, Congress quickly rubber-stamped an AUMF for Iraq, an order much more contested, with Ron Paul this time voting no, but still passed with a comfortable margin.
After Bush termed out, Obama, who campaigned against the Iraq war, utilized the AUMF of 2001 to justify his wars against Syria, Libya, Somalia, the increased troop presence in Afghanistan, and the genocide in Yemen. Utilizing the terrorist angle, Obama, the 2009 Nobel Peace Price laureate, flat out targeted and murdered American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki with a drone strike, without trial, in direct violation of multiple sections of the Constitution. Though he was suspected of joining al Qaeda, he was in no way, shape, or form, an imminent threat to the United States, as he was thousands of miles away in Yemen. He was the first American citizen in history to be killed in a targeted, extrajudicial military strike by the US government. Only two weeks later, his son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, born in Denver, was killed by a US drone strike, also in Yemen at age 16. He had no known ties to al Qaeda and Obama's Press Secretary defended the kill by blaming his father's irresponsibility. Got it. so if you have a bad father, a politician can kill you and sleep soundly the next night. Wonderful. Years later, in a raid in Yemen ordered by Donald Trump, American citizen Nawar al-Awlaki, Anwar's eight-year-old daughter, was killed by a gunshot wound to the neck.
At no point during any of these military incursions did any politician outside of Ron Paul seem to have any realization that Osama Bin Laden explicitly stated that his goal was to get the United States involved in costly and deadly conflicts over in the Middle East. Instead, the politicians, mostly the neocons, whether ignorant or outright lying, simply claimed that "they hate our freedoms" or that the Muslim faith is inherently evil and wants to stamp out other religious nations. In a catastrophic show of just how clueless some of the pro-war politicians can be, Tim Ryan, who was on the Armed Services Committee, in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary debates, claimed that the Taliban flew the planes into the Twin Towers, to which Tulsi Gabbard had to correct him that no, al Qaeda flew the planes into the Twin Towers, not the Taliban. Is it any wonder the war in Afghanistan was such a clusterfuck, when politicians like Tim Ryan, who at that point had 19 years to read one newspaper article about 9/11, didn't even know who we were supposed to be fighting?
Finally, as the disastrous war in Afghanistan was coming toward a close, the roar for the war on terror took a turn inward as mostly progressive Democrats began to push for a war against domestic terrorism, which also through ignorance or outright lying, claimed that January 6th Capitol riot was an inherent danger to the country. Great. So now all the murdering of innocent families, including children, abroad, they're just going to wantonly focus inward into the country? Brilliant.
The cost of war in both dollars and the lives and limbs of our brothers, sisters, sons, and daughters, was not the only middle finger coming out of DC to its own citizens.
The federal government, more specifically the NSA, had increased its surveillance dragnet to cover just about every form of communication out there, following the rushed passage of the unpatriotic PATRIOT Act. The huge scandal exposed by Edward Snowden should chill everyone to their bones. Whistle-blowers, journalists, activists, and anyone who wanted to live a private life, were all put in danger by the sweeping deep state apparatus, not to mention the blatant and intentional violations of the Fourth Amendment, given their rubber-stamp secret FISA "courts". Although the Obama Administration tried to frame the information dragnet as just collecting "metadata" and National Intelligence Director James Clapper flatly told Senator Ron Wyden and the rest of Congress that the NSA was not spying on the American public, the documents released by Snowden show that both were an outright lie. Unsurprisingly, Clapper was not thrown in jail for lying to Congress. One of the heads of the deep state lies to Congress and the American people? Whatever. Business as usual. But a whistleblower exposing the truth about what the government is doing? Do everything we can to throw him in jail and throw away the key!
The Obama Administration, despite promising to be the most transparent presidency in history when elected, charged more than twice the number of journalists and whistleblowers under the Espionage Act as all the previous presidents combined. Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who reported the Snowden case, was pressured by the US government, with his partner being detained by authorities at Heathrow. It didn't stop, as later, Julian Assange was brutally treated in his extradition for reporting on wrongdoing by the US government. The federal government has, without a doubt, become far more Orwellian since 9/11, making it harder for people to report on bad actors in powerful positions in the government.
People's freedom to travel had also been curtailed sharply. The events on 9/11 led the federal government to create the Transportation Security Administration, the agency that right around zero people like, even if you include its employees. It's an easy target for comedy, but the agency's utter uselessness, failing 95% of its screening sting operation in 2015 and two years later, improving to an 80% fail rate, still an F- performance. Adding to this the fact that the TSA has never stopped a single terrorist, TSA's absolute uselessness is difficult to overstate. Even Donald Trump's mouth had higher efficacy in telling the truth than the TSA did at their jobs. At the same time, the TSA social media feed boasts of their confiscations, including dangerous items such as whiskey stones in the shape of bullets and other novelty items that are obviously not weapons.
It's hard to imagine now, but one didn't need to have an airplane ticket to pass the security checkpoint. Loved ones didn't have to sit by themselves in the waiting area to board. We were able to walk through a metal detector without some creep in a backroom gaping at our junk or some creep in the front room grabbing our junk. The TSA, for some reason, has an exception to allow child sexual abuse. Air travelers were also able to bring liquids over 3.4oz, but now, if we need to, we have to pour the liquids into two separate bottles and put them in a transparent baggie. Now we're totally safe! We also were able to walk through with shoes on, but now we have to rub our feet or socks over the same surface thousands of people have just rubbed over with their own feet.
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| The names at the 9/11 memorial weren't the only lives lost as a consequence to 9/11. // photo my own |
Don't get me wrong. Things are actually better today than in August of 2001. I have a wife and child now and a career in a field I love, all of which bring me tremendous joy. Things I didn't have in 2001. Phones give me internet nearly anywhere I go. Medical advances have been tremendous. Computing power has skyrocketed. I can take photographs as high quality as film and share them across the world with millions of people.
All of the good things in the past twenty years have been because of voluntary actions between people. Just about all of the most terrible things in the past twenty years have been because of government action. If we improve from where we are at now, it will be because we still have more voluntary actions between people than we have government action. Keep this in mind next time we have a major crisis and the government decides to take more power, like, oh I don't know...in a pandemic, hypothetically?
